The Client
With tens of thousands of employees worldwide and millions of active customers, this prestigious financial institution is endorsed by decades of tradition in the business.
The Goal
Our client needed to move their entire IT infrastructure to the Cloud.
Servers were beginning to show signs of fatigue, while many of daily-use software applications could use some updates. Of course, they could’ve just purchased new servers – many large organizations still find the critical transition to the Cloud too terrifyingly-complex to even attempt. But the numbers showed undeniable arguments in favor of change.
With such a large organization, mostly-manual server maintenance had been an increasingly costly process. What is more, scalability is next-to-zero with physical servers, while the Cloud offers simple, fast and cost-effective ways of adapting to an organization’s ever-changing needs. It was becoming clear that the automatization and scalability advantages Cloud-based technology provided were a way of significantly reducing maintenance cost, while making it easy to continuously keep all software applications up-to-date.
However, our client was concerned with safeguarding their sensitive information – a reasonable concern for a financial organization that has the data-security of millions of customers worldwide to consider.
Our Challenges
We quickly identified our first opportunity to make a difference when our customer mentioned this concern regarding security. Could sensitive information security be guaranteed? We had a fail-proof plan.
Our second challenge was efficient project-management. With data from a huge number of servers to be moved to the Cloud, the transition was far from a straightforward, risk-free implementation. The most difficult part was, of course, the actual process of relocating all that information without causing interference with everyday business processes. Our client challenged us with a severe maximum-acceptable-downtime for this mitigation, but we’re never the ones to run-off in the face of a demanding task.
Our last – yet never least important – measure for success was cost-reduction. Instead of having engineers perform all hosting tasks, we were planning on automating as much of the process as possible, in order to help our client achieve more efficient management of IT-related costs.
The InCrys Solution
After vigilant planning, we’ve decided it was best to have the better part of information be transferred during the weekend, in order to have critical processes up-and-running come Monday. Our habit of developing sustainable, future-proof automatization tools always allows us to redirect the vital hands-on-work resources into planning, managing and insuring data security.
It had been clear from that start that, with such huge volumes of financial-related data, the choice had to be a Private Cloud. The team was assigned Network Infrastructure Security specialists with significant experience in working with the financial sector, to ensure a comprehensive specific-challenges perspective.
In order to support transparent cost-management of our customer’s new Cloud-enabled IT infrastructure, we suggested our most in-demand billing option with projects of this type: the flexible ‘Pay per Use’ billing system, which supports investing only as much as your changing needs dictate in weekly maintenance.
The Results
Our client feels that making the transition to Cloud Managed Services was a profitable change and, at the end of the day, that’s the most significant accomplishment.
- We’ve managed this though transition with the impressively-low, weekend-long downtime for critical systems.
- Our client’s security-related concerns were put at ease as soon as we went into detail with our security measures.
- The transparent and flexible billing system offered efficient IT cost-management.
- Switching to Cloud Managed Services allowed this multinational company to achieve 20% IT-related cost-reduction.