About the customer
Customer is a leading financial services firm, with diverse offerings in the space of non-banking and housing finance, wealth and asset management, mutual funds, investment banking and advisory services. With a highly motivated workforce of over 20,000+ employees combined with their network of 1900+ branches distributed throughout the country, customer serves 4 million+ customers.
Multiple applications meant complex maintenance, increased costs, and data security hazard
Customer’s multiple business applications were critical to their success. Their existing infrastructure posed several impediments to their envisioned growth:
Scalability Challenges: Their existing infrastructure was restrictive. Their critical client facing applications on customer, KYC, mutual funds, amongst others, were all hosted on a third-party on-premise datacentre. Financial services major’s IT team was constantly adding new applications to their 23 websites, with new infrastructure required each time. Immediate availability of the requisite infrastructure was a challenge. It would take a minimum of 5 to 6 days to set up the new infrastructure impacting business operations, making the process cumbersome and delaying application go-live.
Cost & Security Challenges: The third-party operations were a serious cost-centre. Moreover, customer was using tape-backups for SQL backup, which were expensive. Transferring the tapes between datacentres was also unfeasible and a security hazard.
Optimization Challenges: Customer witnessed great activity disparity across its websites. It had peaks and troughs of activity on its website and it was unable to scale up or down in real time, further impacting costs.
Commercial Challenges: The applications required high-bandwidth to withstand the high influx of active users. Low bandwidth issues with their existing setup posed a continuous pressure, causing performance issues. This resulted in a loss of revenue for the customer.
Data Availability: The existing storage infrastructure made the process of accessing data cumbersome. It would take up to 2 days to retrieve stored data, and the fear of data-loss loomed persistently.
Business Continuity: Their customers are completely dependent on the websites and portals to interact with their offerings, and thus they required a resolution with minimal downtime.
Tapping into the power of Azure to modernize applications
In consultation with Embee, customer understood the need to migrate some of their applications to Azure. The question was how. Embee’s team designed a solution to move over 3 business units utilizing over 10 applications forms their on-premise infrastructure to Azure, utilizing over 80 Virtual Machines. We used the following Azure resources to modernize their applications:
Application Gateway: to address the issues of application bandwidth, mitigating the need for third-party products.
Azure Storage: for back-up. Their erstwhile legacy tape-backups were modernized to Azure, overcoming the challenges of data-loss and risk. Moreover, the Storage as a Service model also helped optimize cost.
SQL Always ON Availability Group: Earlier, the failure of a single database resulted in application down-time. With this solution, down-time was eliminated.
Azure Automation Account: Utilising the automation account, customer now has the capacity to scale their application development and testing without cost-concerns.
Azure DDOS protection: To protect additional security from Denial Of Service attacks, we opted for this service.
Azure Security Centre Standard: To provide a holistic security on their Azure infrastructure
The customer further configured Azure Functions, Web Apps, SQL Database and Event Grid to maximize their utility of the Azure platform.
The solution impact:
The advantages of the solution became visible from day one. Now, the organization enjoys:
Improved system performance: The new, cloud-based system architecture ensured better overall system performance than the customer’s previous on-premise setup. Microsoft Azure guaranteed 99.9% uptime along with the ability to load-balance between 6 servers on the backend to ensure smooth performance for users. This also ensured business is always up and available.
Improved scalability: The ability to scale infrastructure quickly was one of the key requirements from the customer for this project. The implementation of Azure cloud gave them the freedom to leverage the IaaS and PaaS models to use only as much capacity as they require, thereby providing an ideal customer experience to the users.
Reduced TCO: The cloud-based solution helped the customer drive significant reductions in procurement, implementation and maintenance costs.
Modernized Infrastructure: With the infrastructure completely managed by Microsoft Azure, moreover the customer enjoys more feature to make the environment more reliable by deploying the front end servers on two different racks using Availability Set functionality on Azure.
Sailing smooth with Azure Application Migration
Customer is now reassured with a cost-effective, scalable, reliable cloud solution, saving on major infrastructure costs and provide an unprecedented peace of mind.
The solution is universal. The benefits of such migration are being more widely adopted to reducing costs and attaining the desired scalability and uptime. It can be applied to any organisation running business critical applications with variable utility.
With Embee’s dedicated consultation, robust delivery and the reliability of the Azure platform, customer is also expanding their Azure utilization with Remote Managed Services of their IT infrastructure. This is expected to further increase their Azure footprint.
Embee is a recognized leading technology partner in India with 34+ years of experience in delivering digital transformation to its 2000+ customers. We are uniquely positioned to empower businesses to be more with Cloud and Datacentre Technologies enabling them to leverage the latest resources on various cloud platforms. Our solutions are known to help customers optimize costs through application modernization and serverless computing. Choosing a right managed services provider ensures you attain peace of mind and focus entirely on your day-to-day business operations and exceling strategies.
