Globally Acclaimed Welfare Organization Expands Operations in India with Secure Hosting Infrastructure on Public Cloud and Managed Services from Embee

• Our client needed to migrate workload and applications to Cloud, with on-demand self-service functionality and disaster recovery solution.
• Embee positioned Microsoft Azure-based hosting and end-to-end Managed Services.
• 100% availability delivered, along with heightened security, maximized uptime, optimized performance and improved scalability.

International children’s and mothers’ welfare organization migrates workload and applications to Azure, achieves 100% availability, heightens security and improves scalability with Microsoft Azure-based hosting and end-to-end Managed Services from Embee.

About the Customer:
Our client is an international children’s and mothers’ welfare organization that provides humanitarian and developmental assistance. Headquartered in New York, it has presence in 190 countries and territories with over 150 country offices, headquarters and other offices. It also has 7 regional offices to provide technical assistance to country offices.

Our Customer’s Business Requirements:
Expanding its operations in India, our client demanded expandable internet bandwidth, spam-free email system, unlimited Cloud storage and round-the-clock infrastructure monitoring. Additionally, they needed to host its websites and web-based applications to a secure, reliable and highly available hosting environment. The detailed scope of the project has been listed below:

• Cloud Storage and Networking: The client needed a robust IaaS solution that enabled them to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources in order to deploy and run standard software, which can include operating systems and applications. Additionally, they needed ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
• Public Cloud Hosting: The client required their Cloud infrastructure to be provisioned for open use by the general public without any restriction to resources within a practical limit as there is often the need for it to be owned by a business, academic, or government organization and so on. The infrastructure required to have certain essential characteristics, such as:
  • On-demand self-service that enabled a consumer to unilaterally provision computing capabilities as and when required without any human involvement.
  • Broad network access that enabled easy access of computing capabilities through standard mechanisms across multiple mobile devices.
  • Resource pooling that catered to multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with location independence and with various physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand.
  • Rapid Elasticity: Capabilities had to be elastically provisioned and released to automatically scale if needed, both outward and inward in order to meet the demand.
  • Measured Service: Cloud systems were required to automatically control and optimize resource usage by leveraging a metering capability. Resource usage also needed to be monitored, controlled and reported to provide complete transparency for both the provider and the consumer.
• Disaster Recovery: The client also required periodic backup and recovery options to be conducted to ensure maximum uptime

It was also necessitated their infrastructure of the hosting solution to be managed by the vendor with very stringent availability service-level agreement (SLA), without the need for any third-party interaction.

Our Solution:

Embee was the chosen solution partner for this project due to our technical and delivery expertise as well as the client’s satisfactory experiences with us during previous engagements. Understanding each of the multiple requirements, Embee opted for Microsoft Azure. This enabled us to set up instant, robust and scalable computing infrastructure that can be managed and maintained remotely. Besides installation and configuration management (except web applications), Embee provided load working and clustering solutions, separate and secure environment for communication and collaboration. We also created instances for production development and testing as well as strengthened the client’s network security with Firewalls.

Here are some of the salient features of our solution:

• Cloud-Based Infrastructure Set-Up: Embee installed, configured and managed the client’s Microsoft Azure-based infrastructure. A Windows 2008 Web Server and a database server with Microsoft SQL were also installed, configured and hosted in a secured managed hosting infrastructure. Additionally, we also created multiple virtual web-servers on the above, provided public IP addresses for web applications as well as a separate and secure environment with Microsoft SharePoint.
• Server Monitoring and Constant Support: Embee manages the entire platform including server monitoring, updating patches for optimized performance and reduced risks, and backing the data. Network load balancing and clustering solutions along with a robust business continuity plan (BCP) for (storage area network) has helped us to ensure 99.5 % network uptime through multiple uplinks. Apart from creating instances for production, development and testing and creating a domain environment of the services, Embee also provided round the clock support for technologies like for their infrastructure and applications
• Advanced Security Measures: We put in place best security measures as per industry standards to prevent intrusion and hacking. Regular penetration testing and vulnerability assessment of application are also conducted to ensure threats are detected early on and dealt with immediately.
• End-to-End Managed Services: Embee provided end-to-end self-management capability with guaranteed performance outcome. Constant remote monitoring was conducted for all workloads, except applications. These included management of virtual machines, network, database and performance. Besides regular backups being taken on daily, weekly and monthly-basis, as per the client’s requirement, patch management was also done to ensure uncompromised security of data and operations.

The scope of our services also included arrangements for necessary personnel, equipment, supplies, materials, tools, transportation, facilities, and services components. Besides licensing assistance and the aforementioned solution, Embee is currently providing the client with support desk reports, web trends report and server security audits, as per contract.

The Impact of Our Solution:

Embee’s solution helped our customer to significantly simplify their Cloud infrastructure and capabilities, rendering it more scalable, flexible and easily manageable. The benefits extended by our solution include:

• Heightened Security: Our wide range of security measures including firewalls-based network monitoring, regular penetration testing, and vulnerability assessment of application and services improved the overall robustness of the customer’s network and ensured risks are detected and dealt with before they become serious threats.
• Maximized Uptime: Embee’s newly designed clusters, constant monitoring and disaster recovery services ensured 24x7x365 business continuity for the client. Regular maintenance saw to it that hardware and software failure was practically reduced to zero.
• Optimized Performance: Having an Azure-based infrastructure meant that our customers can not only get the most out of their virtual machines (VMs) but can also scale their cloud computing capabilities as and when required. That, coupled with the enhanced ease of communication and collaboration across teams and departments and easy accessibility of data helped them to be more productive.
• Improved Scalability: Our client is constantly growing and adding new services that, understandably, required more compute power. Our Azure-based solution helped the customer gain much required agility and scalability to accommodate growing end user demand at any time, without having to depend on third-party services.