NEURODIVERSITY EMPLOYMENT NETWORK
Mentra is a neurodivergent-friendly talent platform that uses humanistic AI and community-driven design to intelligently match neurodiverse individuals with employers that value their strengths. They have aggressive goals to multiply the growth of their platform and success in driving information-driven matches of neurodivergent job seekers with meaningful jobs. To support their growing platform and scalability needs, Microsoft AI for Accessibility brought in trusted Microsoft Azure experts and Designated Solutions Partner, Valorem Reply, to help Mentra migrate workloads from Google Cloud to Azure and develop existing applications and ML models leveraging larger datasets. A key part of Mentra’s mission is to mitigate the bias against neurodivergent candidates in job-seeking platforms. This requires multiple data sources to be compiled and analyzed to produce insights, reveal patterns, and ultimately fuel their algorithms to achieve this goal. Valorem Reply partnered with Mentra to design and deploy an Azure infrastructure to help them strengthen their platform, user experience and overall mission.
Shea is one of the most brilliant engineers that I've ever worked with. It wasn't a matter of whether he could do the migration, he simply needed help to accelerate his Azure learning and get started off on the right foot with the new platform. As a digital transformation partner, Valorem Reply is not only there to help clients get migrated to Azure but also ensure they are equipped to manage and scale successfully from there. This project was a great example of how Valorem Reply can augment expertise that's already present and work shoulder-to-shoulder in collaboration with our customers to ensure short and long term success.
Steve Cummings, VP Customer Success, Valorem Reply
This project is a great example of how technology can help great organizations like Mentra do more good with less. With their newly modernized and optimized platform, Mentra can now take advantage of the scale and agility of Azure’s simplified capacity and resource management services while also preparing for the future and more advanced workloads like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to only continue driving their mission. The cloud allows you to rationalize your investments, become more resilient and drive innovation with quick and easy experimentation.
Steve Cummings, VP Customer Success, Valorem Reply
We're looking to really multiply our growth and none of this would have been possible without the migration onto the Azure Cloud, thanks to the incredible help of Valorem Reply and Cluster Reply. We used to be on the Google Cloud Platform, which was complicated and just wasn't scaling to the point where we could really support the needs of our rapidly growing job database and a rapidly growing customer base. So, we spent a couple of months with Steve and his amazing team to migrate our entire application onto lots of different Azure services, including Azure App Service, Azure for Postgres SQL, and Azure app functions. Really taking the most advantage of Azure, not only their scalability but also their security. I think that's something that we lacked on Google Cloud Platform: this level of security and peace of mind, especially because we're dealing with such sensitive information.
Shea Belsky, CTO, Mentra
[My advice to nonprofit and social good organizations] Definitely, don't be afraid to go with more resources than you need in the beginning and scale things back if you need to. It's better to have more resources than you need and not need them versus being unable to keep up the capacity, and then struggle under the weight. Just checking a setting within Azure, which is really easy to … automatically scale based on demand. Explore all the options you have available to you to make sure that when the time comes when someone posts a really big article, Tweet, or TikTok about you, you’ll be ready for it.
Shea Belsky, CTO, Mentra
Challenges and Opportunities
- Existing Google Cloud Platform not allowing the scale needed to support Mentra's rapidly growing job database and customer base.
- Higher level of security needed to protect sensitive user information.
- Existing ML models not available in current environment.
Solutions
- Upgrade and migrate Mentra’s infrastructure to Azure to improve the operational efficiency of their neurodivergent employment network platform.
- Build a security layer that will prevent malicious actors from accessing the platform.
- Develop a neurodiverse jobs dataset and train ML/AI.
Results
- Scalable, highly available, and performant Azure infrastructure to support the future needs of Mentra.
- 360-degree observability and actionable insight into application performance to speed response times and improve reliability.
- Ability to automatically scale up and down resources to be more responsive and faster in meeting the needs of customers.