Fullerton India

Fullerton India achieved increased customer satisfaction and reduced capital expenditure by migrating their infrastructure to AWS Cloud.

Executive Summary

Fullerton India Credit Co. Ltd. is a member of the SMBC Group and is registered with the Reserve Bank of India as an NBFC – Investment and Credit Company (NBFC-ICC). SMFG India Credit began operations in India in 2007 and is now a significant NBFC with a pan-India reach. They have reached the market by connecting with around 3.2 million clients, whether in cities, towns, or villages, directly at their doorstep, by working with about 16,500 staff. They have a strong presence in the market, with over 729 branches encompassing 600 towns and about 65,000 villages. Engaging in specialized markets, providing financial access to underserved and unserved populations. We have thereby introduced them to formal credit.

Current Challenges by the Customer

The customer has a VMware vCenter-based infrastructure with over 250 virtual machines and 40TB of data running on version 6.5. In contrast, the database size was roughly 500GB when it was running on the MS SQL 2017 Standard edition engine, with an estimated yearly growth of 50GB (10%). As a result of the old system, limited end users handled minimal hardware and software support, as well as costly application maintenance. The most important thing to take care of was facilitating a highly available and affordable solution.

The Solution Offered

Pentagon systems and services used Application Migration services to deliver migration solutions that leverage the potential of various popular AWS services stacks, such as Migration Hub, Application Discovery Service, Database Migration Service, CloudFormation, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Application load balancer, AWS Transit Gateway, and AWS Direct Connect, among others, for planning, migration, and optimization.

Finished the whole server migration with the Application Migration service. Once the migration is complete, the data changes are replicated (CDC). The AWS Console was used to manage the entire migration process through the Application Migration service.

During the Pre-migration support, it was the lift-and-shift form of migration that identified all the challenges. As a result, Pentagon systems and services will help to accelerate their cloud migration by utilizing AWS Migration Acceleration Programme (MAP) methodology, conducting discovery and analysis to get a clear picture of what will be migrating, and creating a business case and total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis for migration.

Pentagon systems and services used AWS Application Discovery Service to undertake an in-depth examination of Fullerton India’s on-premises data center during the Assess phase. Later, we created a business case that clearly contrasted the existing on-premises expense with the cost of using the AWS cloud with a defined ROI.

Furthermore, as part of the migration plan, a Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) was performed, allowing for a clear understanding of the business cloud journey, analysis of the transition to a cloud-ready company, a plan of action to close identified gaps.

Leveraging AWS Migration Evaluator, during the evaluation process to get a thorough inventory of the on-premises infrastructure, which contained the following critical parameters:

• The number of servers to be relocated along with the operating system.
• The CPU and memory needs of the application and their utilizations.
• Storage growth, utilization, and configuration rates.
• Backup and restoration requirements, including techniques, frequency, and strategy.

We addressed the gaps in their organization’s preparation revealed during the assessment in the Mobilise phase, with a focus on building a baseline environment, operational readiness, and developing cloud capabilities. PoCs were performed with a minimal workload, which helped them understand their AWS cloud migration process. During the mobilization phase, the organization learns new skills, tools, and competencies, leading to an iterative migration process. These characteristics and talents help to build momentum and accelerate migration attempts over time.

Also, we have planned for the creation of Landing Zone or AWS Control Tower from AWS which helped the organization to establish a solid foundation for managing their AWS environment. It provided a scalable, secure, and well-governed infrastructure, ensuring consistent best practices, compliance, and cost optimization across multiple accounts and workloads for their infrastructure.

After the applications were successfully migrated, Pentagon systems and services focused on modernizing their architecture and utilizing native AWS services. They used AWS Application Migration Service to rehost and optimize their cloud application. This meant rethinking individual components, developing serverless or containerized deployments, and leveraging AWS-managed services using CloudFormation.

The solution simplified the integration of their applications with other AWS services, resulting in increased scalability, availability, and performance. For the various workloads that must be moved, numerous migration methodologies have been developed, as will be explained below.

• Migrated on-premises VMware-based infrastructure to AWS.
• Migrated on-premises Databases to AWS RDS (Multi-AZ).
• Re-architected and deployed legacy applications to run in AWS.
• Addressed application dependencies, migration strategies, costing, and OS licensing using Application Discovery Service, SMS, TCO, S3 Calculator, etc.
• We used the Migration Hub Console to monitor the replication jobs.
• Boosted migration plan for on-premises servers based on RTO and RPO.
• Configured.NET apps on MS Windows EC2 instances in the multi-AZ environment.
• Used RDS MS-SQL server in multi-AZ config for scalable DB operations.
• Autoscaling groups to reduce the operational complexity of managing applications.
• Configured Application load balancer to distribute the user traffic onto the servers deployed in a different availability zone.
• Notification and alerting configured on AWS SES and SNS.
• AWS Migration Hub and SMS services to track and migrate the workload.
• Data was shifted to Amazon S3, which were then imported into the EC2 instances.
• Migrated on-premises Databases to AWS RDS (Multi-AZ) setup to achieve high availability and simplified the operation and scaling of databases in the AWS Cloud.
• Amazon Route 53 service was being used for DNS resolutions for their web application. A scalable and highly available Domain Name System (DNS) web service which manages and routes traffic to their applications by translating domain names into IP addresses or CNAME.
• Before the cutover, the database export dump files were copied to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and imported into the Amazon RDS for the MS-SQL database on AWS.
• Backup policies were set up for the EC2 instances using AWS Backup services which will automatically create the snapshot of the server as per the plan created.
• The use of AWS Key Management Service (KMS) provided key storage, key management, and data in transit and at rest.
• AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall), a managed service offering from AWS was being used to which helped protecting their web applications from common web-based attacks. It acts as a protective layer between their web application and the internet, allowing us to define security rules and filters to mitigate potential threats.
• AWS Transit Gateway is used to access many Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) via a central hub, which streamlines the network and eliminates complex peering arrangements. Furthermore, Private Link and OpenVPN Access Server have been implemented to create private connectivity between AWS services and point-to-site connectivity for remote connectivity.
• We have deployed Direct Connect which completely focuses on establishing dedicated and private connections between on-premises infrastructure and AWS along with site-to-site connection.
• The customer was able to protect business-critical data, establish access control and network segmentation, and give users with encrypted remote access using this network solution.
• AWS GuardDuty and AWS Security HUB were enabled on the account to enhance their security posture, gain visibility into potential threats, respond quickly to security incidents and reduce the risk of security breaches, protect sensitive data, and maintain a secure and compliant AWS environment.

Amazon Web Services Infrastructural Services Used

Project Start Date:  Aug – 2021

Project End Date:  Jun – 2023

The Benefits:

By shifting their workload to AWS Cloud, Fullerton India was able to meet its set technical drivers in the most cost-effective manner while maintaining business continuity and high availability for their workload.

• Streamlined Migration: The service improved and automated the application migration process, avoiding manual work and any errors.
• Seamless Replication: The customer was able to replicate their on-premises applications to AWS without interfering with production, ensuring a smooth migration process.
• Modernization Opportunities: By utilizing the AWS Application Migration Service, customers were able to update their applications and utilize cloud-native services, increasing their scalability, agility, and operational effectiveness.
• Cost Advantages: We prevented unforeseen costs and delays by outlining goals and criteria in advance, making the transition speedier and more cost-effective. Cost savings from improved infrastructure.
• Simplicity of deployment: The AWS CloudFormation template was used to deploy the infrastructure in less time.
• The data can easily be restored from the backup configured if any data loss or disaster takes place.
• Because the data is being stored in Amazon S3 so the cost is reduced as the pricing will be as per pay-as-you-go.
• Improved user experience and increased customer satisfaction.
• Reduced their capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, data centres, and infrastructure.

Solution Architecture Diagram

1. Migration Architecture