It goes without saying that information technology is integral to most businesses today. IT helps an enterprise reach out to customers, streamline operations, reduce costs, improve efficiency, maximize profit, Optimize usage, provide better service, support better relationships with partners, and enable feedback from customers and other stakeholders.
In most industries today, IT is not just an enabler but is also a competitive differentiator. For instance, banks and brokerages that cannot provide fast, accurate, and secure services will lose customers to the competition. Engineering companies that cannot rapidly design, test, and validate new products will lose market share to more agile competitors. And so on.
But IT costs money. The total cost of establishing an enterprise wide network with compute, storage, interconnects, and linkages to an extended supply chain over vast geographical areas starts adding up rapidly. As a rule of thumb, established businesses outside the technology industry typically spend between 0.5% and 10% of their annual revenue on technology, depending on the industry. Manufacturing and retail are typically at the low end of this range, while finance and health care are typically at the high end.
These are large expenses. As technology cycles get shorter and shorter, how do you optimize your technology spend? How can you prevent obsolescence? What about the expensive IT hardware and software already installed in your enterprise? How can you leverage your legacy systems even as you have to embrace new technologies to remain competitive?
“Today, most enterprise customers are aware that cloud computing offers one of the best ways to upgrade technology at an acceptable cost,” says Sharad Sanghi, CEO of Netmagic, a Mumbai-based cloud services provider. “And yet, no enterprise can simply throw out their legacy IT systems. There’s too much at stake in terms of sunk costs and business continuity. So the move to the cloud can only be an evolution, not a revolution.”
Sanghi is right. Survey after survey by market research firms such as Gartner, IDC, and others point to a clear move to a hybrid cloud configuration. IDC predicts that “more than 65% of IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud technologies before 2016, vastly driving the rate and pace of change in IT organizations”. A hybrid cloud is a configuration where an enterprise retains mission critical or sensitive data and compute within its direct control, and outsources all other compute activities to a public cloud.
The challenge for enterprises is how to accomplish this shift without junking their current architecture.We showcase three instances where Netmagic helped customers to leverage their existing investments in IT by adopting a hybrid IT architecture that combined the best of their legacy systems with new cloud technologies.These companies — RBL Bank, India Infoline, and HDFC Standard Life — are examples of how growing businesses can make the transition from their legacy IT systems to new age computing.
RBL Bank
Established in Kohlapur in 1943 as Ratnakar Bank, RBL Bank spent the next 65 years serving small and medium businesses in the Kohlapur-Sangli belt in Maharashtra. In 2010, it began to expand rapidly under a new management. In 2013, it acquired the business banking, credit card business, and India mortgage portfolio of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Today, RBL Bank has a network of over 180 branches and 350 ATMs across 13 Indian states. Such growth demanded a matching technology upgrade.
Prior to 2010, the erstwhile Ratnakar Bank had a very basic IT infrastructure. Branches were connected to the head office through point-to-point desktop systems. A central server in Kolhapur hosted the core banking application and supporting applications for mail, messaging, anti-money laundering, and asset liability management.
RBL wanted to upgrade IT systems to accommodate growth, but also wanted to optimize their existing investments in IT. A hybrid IT architecture was the natural choice with a centralized data center for retaining core applications and data, and distributed IT infrastructure for the branch network.
Netmagic helped RBL to move to a hybrid IT environment wherein their core banking application was hosted on a virtualized AIX environment at a Netmagic data center. This was connected to a virtualized private cloud using VMware and Hyper-V for the rest of the IT infrastructure. The Netmagic datacenter is now the backbone of the RBL’s IT infrastructure and serves to consolidate the entire network including banking applications, mail and messaging, authentication systems, databases, and supporting systems for HR, credit rating, cash management, and workflow and associated systems.
Netmagic also supports and manages firewalls, network links from multiple service providers connecting all branches of the bank across the country, and servers spread across its data centers.
RBL has set up a DNOC (Dedicated Network Operations Center) which is monitored 24×7. To prevent data leakage in bank branches, the bank has implemented desktop virtualization using Citrix so that dumb terminals at the branches can only access data from a secured centralized location.
“Netmagic demonstrated a comprehensive set of skills and experience,” says Sanjay Sharma, Head – Technology, Innovation& Customer Fulfillment. “They had expertise across diverse platforms — Unix, Linux, Windows, VMware, and Hyper-V — and they have a great deal of experience in managing datacenters. We believe we now have a robust, secure, and scalable primary and backup IT systems in place.”
Ratnakar Bank has realized significant business benefits from their hybrid IT architecture. Netmagic’s round the clock support, maintenance and technical expertise ensures faster turnaround times (TAT) and improved performance levels. A dedicated Network Operations Center (NOC) team manages and monitors the bank’s critical IT infrastructure and provides technical support for incident and change management. Netmagic has also provided the bank with L1/L2/L3 technical support across domains, namely Windows, Network, Linux and AIX.
India InfoLine
Established in 1995, financial services provider India Infoline Finance Limited (IIFL) today has a network of 3000 locations spread over more than 500 towns and cities in India and Dubai, NewYork, andSingapore. In 2007, as the business grew rapidly, IIFL decided to streamline and optimize its IT infrastructure to support its wide range of offerings from equity research, derivatives, and commodities trading to loan products and investment banking.
Till 2010, IIFL’s IT infrastructure was scattered across its multiple locations. This made capacity planning difficult with significant management time being diverted from operations to planning. Management of this scattered IT infrastructure was also tedious and cumbersome. To improve efficiency, IIFL decided to centralize and outsource a part of their IT infrastructure. Netmagic worked with IIFL to identify cloud-ready production workloads and moved them to a Netmagic public cloud. This not only extended IIFL’s existing IT investments but also helped them transition workloads from their old servers to the new on-demand virtualized cloud environment. Netmagic also provided IT services to monitor and manage IIFL’s IT infrastructure.
In spite of this, by April 2011, IIFL’s IT infrastructure management had become unwieldy. While the core IT infrastructure was managed by Netmagic, the end-user desktop infrastructure was managed by someone else, and there were multiple vendors for applications. Hoping to consolidate everything with one service provider, IIFL outsourced their entire IT to a well known service provider who claimed to provide end-to-end services. That relationship ran for two years but unraveled as the service provider could not deliver on what they promised.
In 2013, IIFL reverted to a two-partner approach: the end-user desktop computing was outsourced to one service provider, and Netmagic provided and managed the data center and critical server networks in branch offices in urban and rural locations. Today, Netmagic provides IIFL with data center and services to supervise 150+ servers, over 60 instances of Netmagic Public Cloud, and multiple networking devices across locations.
The benefits are substantial. Netmagic has been instrumental in reducing the physical server requirement at IIFL to a just 30% by scaling and streamlining the company’s existing IT infrastructure. In view of IIFL’s need for assured uptime, Netmagic seamlessly automated all of IIFL’s IT environments. The virtualization and centralization of all key client application makes IT management simpler and more efficient.
“Netmagic has helped us expand our business much faster than if we had to depend on and manage our own servers,” says Sushil Tolani, Chief Information Officer at India IIFL. “We have been able to get scalability on-demand using cloud technologies and our IT costs are under control.”
HDFC Standard Life
Established in 2000, HDFC Standard Life is one of India’s leading life insurance providers. The company is a joint venture between Housing Development Finance Corporation Ltd, India and Standard Life plc, UK. HDFC SL has over 400 branches in India serving customers in over 900 towns and cities.
As the business grew, HDFC SL wanted to consolidate their IT applications and infrastructure to accommodate the growing transaction volumes. They also wanted a robust, scalable disaster recovery (DR) solution that was compliant with the insurance sector regulations.
Recognizing that they neither had the resources or the inclination to set up an in-house DR system, HDFC SL selected Netmagic as their outsourcing partner. The requirements were challenging: HDFC SL wanted the DR system to be capable of dynamically allocating virtual machines based on load with no service interruption; real time RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective) dashboard for DR applications; end-to-end managed IT hosting services for the DR site; and high availability of storage with committed IOPs (input/output operations per second).
To accommodate these requirements, Netmagic delivered the DR solution using a hybrid cloud architecture. The database layer was hosted on a private cloud with the database server (Oracle, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL) deployed on SUN servers running Oracle Enterprise Virtualization layer. Netmagic also implemented the Netmagic Tiered Secure Storage service (NTSS), a secure Storage-as-a-Service offering to guarantee IOPS for HDFC SL’s performance-sensitive applications.
The web and application layer (RedHat Linux and Windows environment) was hosted on Netmagic’s SimpliCloud public cloud to control costs and to enable rapid scaling. This layer would only become active when a DR was triggered.
The entire DR infrastructure is protected by a dedicated firewall and a load balancer has been implemented to achieve automated failover and failback without manual intervention.
HDFC SL has realized several tangible benefits from outsourcing their DR. Hosting on Netmagic’s SimpliCloud was 40% to 60% cheaper than a traditional DR setup involving large hardware costs and IT management costs. HDFC SL now has a resilient, dynamic DR infrastructure with very high availability (0.001 percent downtime) of applications. HDFC SL can also scale up or scale down their DR infrastructure,something that would not have been possible in traditional DR.
At the app and web layer, there is complete elasticity and transparency. HDFC SL will be billed only when disaster strikes and the DR solution is invoked. At the database layer, Netmagic’s tiered storage solution (NTSS) ensures the company pays only as and when they use the storage. HDFC SL’s lead-time to provision Infrastructure has been drastically reduced after adopting the cloud model. The Netmagic Service Orchestrator allows them to instantly provision, configure and manage servers, network and storage infrastructure with minimal human intervention.
HDFC SL is now evaluating Netmagic’s state-of-the-art data center facility for outsourcing their testing and development environment and some part of production workloads.
