Growing a business comes with plenty of expected challenges, but most organisations do not anticipate the IT challenges that come with rapid growth. Quickly outgrowing IT applications and infrastructure puts strain on resources, bandwidth, budget, and the ability to continue positive growth.
This was the case for one financial services firm. But with a strategic IT shift to a new Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment with the help of Ntirety’s experts, scalability became possible.
Challenge
Originally, the application was designed to run on dedicated servers but then moved to a streaming application
After enjoying a third consecutive year of double-digit revenue growth, the financial services firm had added 2,000 new users to its application portfolio, while increasing headcount by 40% and expanding into new office space.
With all the growth, the firm’s IT had to make quick moves to keep up. Originally, their application was designed to run on dedicated servers but then moved to a streaming application.
Costs, migration to the cloud
The firm was facing a sprawling infrastructure and spiraling costs, as well as inconsistencies in deployment, configuration, and security policies.
Given the extreme growth the firm was experiencing, they needed to migrate the application to a cloud environment that could scale to manage their business growth in both the U.S. and other countries and, overall, to better serve their customers.
Solution: AWS
Having been a Ntirety client for some time, the firm relied on Ntirety for assistance in migrating their application to AWS. With a cloud-based application, the financial services firm’s customers could leverage timely, agile, and flexible budgeting and forecasting capabilities from anywhere, at any time, without the need for IT involvement.
For the initial build, the firm’s requirements included an Apache Tomcat web tier and a MongoDB database tier (NoSQL). Ntirety worked with the firm to collect these and other requirements and created a reference architecture that worked with all the infrastructure pieces.
Auto-scaling, security-focused design
The environment connected back to their VDI environment via a Direct Connect link with a VPN Failback
Ntirety designed, built, and implemented an auto-scaling, security-focused design for their new application. This environment was designed entirely as code using AWS Cloud Formation and was implemented to be an auto-scaling, secure application.
The entire environment also connected back to their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment via a Direct Connect link with a Virtual Private Network (VPN) Failback.
Results
The design Ntirety implemented allowed the financial services firm to easily add customers on the fly in a matter of minutes versus the 40-plus hours it took to manually add a customer when the application was in the SaaS environment.
Together with Ntirety, the firm successfully moved its production workload over to the AWS model and began offering the platform to new customers. With plans to continue expanding globally, the AWS environment provided the flexible, scalable architecture the firm needed to support ongoing new growth.
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