We audited their code base and checked for security update compatibilities. The audit indicated that we were required to update the Drupal 7 version and their current PHP version to accommodate the security patches. 

The Drupal community releases security updates, bug fixes, and new features regularly. We updated KSL’s Drupal 7 core along with 15 contrib modules to ensure that the digital trading platform was up-to-date with all security patches and that the modules operated seamlessly. 

KSL’s portal used the Apache 2.2 web server. Apache is the most commonly used web server for Drupal. However, the Apache 2.2 web server has a lot of vulnerabilities and thus we upgraded KSL’s Apache server to 2.4. 

The minimum recommended PHP version for Drupal 7 was PHP 7.2.x. KSL’s digital trading platform was operating on the PHP 5.3 version whose support had ended on June 3, 2019. Beyond security considerations, KSL’s portal was missing out on the significant performance improvements that come with the newer versions. Our team upgraded the PHP version to 7.3, which not only comes with security enhancements but also huge performance gains. 

Since the KSL portal acts as a digital trading platform and is used extensively by around 27 lakh customers for equities, derivatives, mutual funds, margin trade funding, depository services, and third-party products like insurance. In order to cater to this large influx of users, the client required all the upgrades and enhancements to the portal to happen with minimum downtime. QED42 considerably reduced the downtime from 6 hours to less than 2 hours and ensured that the portal was up and had minimum impact on end-users.