DevOps Facilitates New Business Model for Global Software Major
The customer is a global provider of document and workflow management solutions. It caters to large banks, governments, insurance companies, healthcare, BPO & IT companies, some of which figure in the Fortune 500 list. The solutions are deployed at the core of operations and the information it stores are business critical.
As a provider of proprietary solutions, it has a huge focus on R&D with large teams engaged in innovating new products and creating patented technologies. Starting as a document management solution, the product line has expanded to encompass all aspects of digital transformation and business process workflow.
The software company followed a traditional business model of selling software licenses to large customers by installing it on premise.
01. Customer Challenge
Document management is critical for companies operating in financial services, healthcare and customer care. Customer sensitive data has a critical bearing on businesses workflow and day-to-day operations but it must also adhere to stringent regulatory and compliance norms. Currently the global software major configures the solution for individual customers on separate servers which is not a scalable model.
Now it wanted to launch a new initiative by targeting small and micro businesses. This is a volume market and it wanted to have a scalable model and an efficient delivery mechanism to be able to sell at an affordable price point. The company was challenged to reduce the cost of servicing customers by reducing the cost of infrastructure and manageability and pass the benefits to customers. The software major wanted a solution whereby it could leverage the same infrastructure for several customers, yet deliver complete privacy and security for each customer.
Based on market referrals, the customer sought Umbrella’s help to achieve the following business objectives:
- Business expansion – enter new market segment with an affordable solution—by lowering infrastructure and servicing cost
- Lower cost of operations- fast customer onboarding and deploy new features and functionality efficiently.
- Easy manageability to lower operational cost.
02. Umbrella Solution Using AWS Services & Third Party Tools
Umbrella worked with a two-pronged approach using Containers and a CICD pipeline to bring in efficiency with increased automation and deliver an affordable solution. Containers enabled to lower the cost structure as multiple containers share underlying infrastructure utilizing resources more efficiently and customers were deployed on separate containers to isolate them and provide adequate privacy.
The CICD pipeline enabled to deliver continuous updates, patches and functionality and lower the cost of manageability.
Umbrella used AWS Container service ECS, Docker images and AWS ECR which is a container orchestration service to achieve faster onboarding of customers. Containers were configured across two Availability Zones with autoscaling for high scalability and availability.
DevOps-enabled CICD pipeline was achieved using Jenkins, Ansible, AWS Lambda and Amazon S3 to enable seamless release without disrupting application availability. We designed an automation system that enabled separate environments for development and production as the company wanted higher security to protect its proprietary source code.
For security and compliance, IAM-based access to all resources with multi-factor authentication for root users was enabled. CloudTrail keeps track of API calls to AWS Lambda, ECS and S3. AWS CloudFormation is used to automate infrastructure configuration for network, security and application and AWS CloudWatch monitors the functioning of infrastructure and application.
03. Benefits
By leveraging containers and automating release management, Umbrella helped the software major to expand its business with a cost-effective solution. Frequent releases empowered the software company to address customer needs better and deploy releases efficiently. Specifically following benefits have accrued to the software company:
- The company tapped a new customer segment with an affordable solution by using containers as efficient infrastructure utilization lowered cost structure.
- Containers enabled to easily onboard new customers in an automated manner with minimum manual intervention.
- By isolating customers on separate Containers, it achieved desired level of privacy and security.
- The inherent scalability and elasticity of Containers enabled to hedge bets of a new business initiative.
Cashify
DevOps Enablement
