CSCS Smart Check
StableLogic builds and operates the AWS-hosted national platform that lets employers verify CSCS cards in seconds — supporting compliance with the Building Safety Act across 37 partner integrations.
About CSCS Smart Check
CSCS Smart Check is the UK construction industry’s national platform for verifying worker credentials. It allows all 2.3 million cards displaying the CSCS logo — across 37 schemes in the CSCS Alliance — to be verified through a single platform, supporting employers, principal contractors and site operators to meet their duties under the Building Safety Act.
The platform is available as an API for integration into site access and induction systems, as a public website at cscssmartcheck.co.uk, and as a mobile app on iOS and Android.
The Challenge
Construction sites need to verify the qualifications of every worker, every time, at scale and in real time. Manual checks were slow, inconsistent, and exposed sites to fraud and compliance risk. CSCS needed a secure, highly available national platform — and the ongoing operational discipline to run it as a safety-critical national service supporting 37 partner integrations and millions of daily verification events.
The AWS Solution
StableLogic designed, built and now operates the CSCS Smart Check platform on AWS, combining platform engineering with 24/7 managed Cloud Operations.
Platform architecture
The platform runs in the AWS London Region (eu-west-2) across multiple Availability Zones for resilience.
- Amazon Route 53 provides DNS and intelligent traffic routing.
- Application Load Balancers across two Availability Zones (eu-west-2a, eu-west-2b) provide a resilient ingress layer for the 37 partner site-access and induction system integrations.
- Amazon ECS Services run the application and API tier across both Availability Zones, scaling automatically to meet fluctuating site-entry demand across thousands of construction sites.
- Amazon RDS Multi-AZ delivers the managed database tier with automated failover.
- Amazon ElastiCache provides caching in a private subnet for high-throughput credential lookups.
- VPC network segmentation, public/private subnet separation and AWS IAM least-privilege protect personal and qualification data and support regulatory compliance.
Ongoing AWS Cloud Operations (24/7)
- Monitoring and alerting: Amazon CloudWatch (logs, metrics and alarms) underpins 24/7 alerting, incident response and on-call runbooks aligned to safety-critical SLAs.
- Security operations: continuous vulnerability assessment with AWS Inspector, with findings remediated under SLA. AWS CloudTrail provides audit logging across the AWS environment, supporting compliance and forensic investigation.
- Capacity management: proactive capacity reviews and ECS scaling aligned to seasonal site-entry demand.
- FinOps: ongoing cost optimisation reviews driven by AWS Cost Explorer, delivering year-on-year cost reduction while platform scale grew.
The Results
- National scale: 37 partner integrations live, 16 million card verifications per year
- Availability: 99.99% platform uptime maintained across the engagement
- Security operations: continuous vulnerability scanning via AWS Inspector with findings remediated under SLA
- Incident response: 24/7 on-call coverage for P1 incidents on a safety-critical national service
- Cost management: ongoing FinOps reviews via AWS Cost Explorer delivering year-on-year cost reduction even as platform scale grew
- Building Safety Act compliance: the platform underpins employer and contractor compliance with the Act’s competence-verification duties