Membes is a Melbourne-based, Australian-owned Association Management System provider, marking over a decade since its 2014 launch and building on more than 20 years of association software experience under its original entity, Asset Media. Today, Membes supports over 200 professional and trade associations across Australia and New Zealand, with expansion into the US market beginning in 2025.. PolarSeven, an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, delivered the Membes Foundation Project: a foundational uplift of governance, security, and infrastructure across Membes’ AWS environment.

The challenge

Membes’ AMS platform has grown steadily into a trusted, multi-tenant solution supporting over 200 associations across Australia and New Zealand. That growth had, over time, outpaced the governance and consistency of the underlying AWS environment, a natural outcome for a fast-scaling SaaS business built on production infrastructure that had served the company well for years.

Membes needed stronger governance and guardrails across its AWS accounts, clearer separation between environments, consistent and auditable deployment practices, and greater visibility into security and operational health, all without disrupting the live platform its association customers depend on daily.

What we did

PolarSeven delivered a foundational uplift across Membes’ AWS environment:

  • Established governance and consistent guardrails across all AWS accounts through AWS Control Tower
  • Extended monitoring and centralised security visibility across every account, including legacy production
  • Separated environments into dedicated devtest, staging, and production accounts, backed by consistent Infrastructure as Code
  • Integrated single sign-on and delivered full as-built documentation for lasting operational confidence

Along the way, the engagement also surfaced further opportunities to improve platform performance, security, and cost efficiency, captured in the results below.

Results

  1. Governance & Visibility: A single Control Tower and SecurityHub view across every account gives Membes consistent guardrails and real-time security visibility, where none existed before.
  2. Operational Resilience: Environment separation, automated backups, and autoscaling reduce risk to the platform that over 200 associations rely on daily.
  3. Performance at Scale: Platform-wide caching cut traffic to origin servers by 30–40%, improving responsiveness for association members.
  4. Cost Efficiency: Consolidation, pipeline modernisation, and retiring legacy infrastructure reduced AWS spend by approximately USD $9,000 per year.
  5. Deployment Confidence: An automated CI/CD pipeline for the Communications API replaced manual deployment, lowering risk and release turnaround.
  6. Team & Documentation: As-built documentation and knowledge transfer leave the Membes team equipped for ongoing operational confidence.

Ongoing partnership

The Foundation Project has grown into an ongoing PolarSeven Managed Services engagement. Foundations like these only hold their value if they’re actively maintained. As Membes continues to scale, including its expansion into the US market, the governance and security guardrails built during this project need continuous attention, not a one-off fix.

As part of the managed services partnership, PolarSeven provides:

  • Proactive monitoring and alerting across all AWS accounts
  • Ongoing security posture management and patching
  • Incident response and escalation support
  • Regular architecture and cost optimisation reviews as the platform scales

This gives the Membes team confidence that their AWS foundations keep pace with the business, while freeing them to focus on the core AMS product and their growing base of association customers.

In their words

“We spent nearly four years looking for the right managed services partner. Six months into working with PolarSeven, we finally feel like we’ve found it.”
— Jason Morris, Founder, Membes

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Phone: 1300 659 575
Email: hello@polarseven.com
Address: Level 2/13/15 Wentworth Ave, Sydney NSW 2000
Website: www.polarseven.com