Largest Bank UAE – Azure Public Cloud
One of the Largest Bank in UAE has consolidated most of their workloads in Azure cloud native ecosystem.
Problem Statement: Business and Technology
The organization chose to be among the many taking a giant leap of faith to run some of their critical apps in Cloud. Organizations taking an alternative and cautious approach usually do the lift and shift to cloud and then architect the app modernization program. This customer in collaboration with HUCO set out to achieve the ambitious but the best approach in reaching cloud native end state – Combining Block chain with App modernization along with cloud adoption. The choice of the cloud was driven by factors like cost, on-prem eco system compatibility and innovation.
The Solution
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30% Opex cost reduction
through optimized usage of resources in cloud
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60% improved security
With the introduction of shift left devsecops controls
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3x increase in reliability
Through resilient infrastructure and automated build and deployments
- Azure became the obvious choice given the current investments of the customer, widespread collaboration of devops and cloud native features in Azure cloud and Huco’s expertise in delivering the advisory based implementation across Design, Day 1 builds and Day2 Operations.Huco proposed Azure as the cloud platform enabled with following domains: for DevOps, SRE, Compute, Cloud native, Network and Security:
- All though the Huco team had blueprints to provision Azure cloud – Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, The Azure console was used to provision the infrastructure due to less number of workloads. Subsequently the Network and Security services – Azure Application Gateway, Azure Load Balancer, Azure Security Center , Azure Firewall, Azure Sentinel, Azure Key Vault, , Azure VPN, Azure DDOS Protection, Azure Active Directory, were enabled based on Industry standards, Customer policies and Huco Security best practices.Azure DevOps was enabled in parallel to onboard application deployment workflows and infrastructure as code pipelines with Azure repos acting as the single source of truth for application code, infra configuration and blueprints.
- The SRE methodologies were enabled to monitor , trace and manage Day2 Operations by setting up a governance and monitoring office and platforms – Azure Monitors.Additionally a fine tune , preconfigured Database ecosystem : Azure Postgres SQL, Azure Cache Redis was implemented for application integrations The solution was designed by a team of experts, standard frameworks and best practices to eventually setup Microsoft based Azure Solution centered around Azure Kubernetes Services to hosts customers blockchain based application
- The solution was delivered in a span of 9 weeks. The Design, Landing Zone and Security integration took majority of the time given the choice of App (Block chain). The best practices around cloud and cloud native use cases were translated into reusable and automated blueprints.
- Two typical and critical challenges around cloud adoption- cost and security were addressed through FinOps framework and Shift Left Agile DevSecOps.
- Huco addressed this by implementing industry standards, translating Huco best practices into reusable and automated blueprints and designing customer’s vision into a scalable solution.
- Customer and Huco team also had a joint Governance and Agile Scrum program to monitor, measure and track timelines, quality and approvals across releases.
- The bank was enabled with a platform that provides auto scalability of resources and provisions infrastructure on-demand for install, configure, upgrade and patching cycles.
- Azure repos , Microsoft teams and Sharepoint technologies were used to documented and record design, configuration and logging artifacts before training and handing over the cloud native program to operations team.
