Probus Public Case Study
Probus Insurance overcomes its challenges with respect to on-premises infrastructure cost, high availability, and security concerns, by hosting their Microsoft workloads on AWS Cloud.
About the Customer
Probus Insurance Broker Private limited is one of the renowned Insurance Broker in India, owing to its manifold progression and distinct lines of business it has ventured over the past years. In addition, Probus is a team of accomplished risk engineers and proficient underwriters. They are a troop of diversified industry expertise that enables us to construct a unique benefit in understanding diverse businesses and their risk profiles.
Further, they are one of the reliable Insurance Broker by virtue of their top-notch processes and customized systems for auditing and analyzing existing Insurance portfolios of the clients, and robust Claims Management Techniques. They possess a strong geographical presence across the country through their offices as well as POS which offers the bandwidth and capacity to provide excellent after sales services as well as Point of Contact for online customers.
Executive Summary
Probus Insurance Broker Private Limited is a prominent Insurance Broker, primarily serving retail clients, with a Pan-India presence and a fine balance of Life and Non-Life Insurance business. With the rapid growth of the online insurance industry, the company entered the online space to leverage its offline network and experience the next level through the medium of a mobile app and an online portal. To consistently provide better insurance solutions to their clients as they strive to become the country’s most respected insurance broker. To provide the clients with the best consulting and insurance services, as well as risk management and advisory services.
Current Challenges by the Customer
Facing issues with performance degradation of their application without any load balancing, and they were also concerned regarding security for their public-facing application.
Backups of application data and databases were kept on HDD and tape drives, which created overhead for keeping those backups for a longer period.
System configurations were not efficient enough to handle the increasing load. They also required the information required to make load balancing and node distribution decisions.
In the event of a failure or disaster of the services or region, having backup procedures planned in place for the Servers supplied will ensure that the infrastructure can be recovered.
Automated snapshot and patching for their MSSQL database.
The Solution Offered
Amazon Web Application Firewall (WAF) along with Application Load Balancer (ALB) was deployed to filter out the traffic to the UI server based on pre-established criteria for their application.
We have proposed Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots and AMI backups to ensure a timely and safe server backup and speed up application recovery in case of any disaster.
For the load balancing of the API server running in the auto-scaling group in a private subnet, we recommended using Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic across Availability Zone.
Our team implemented Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for MS-SQL Server Standard Edition with multi-AZ deployment for High Availability.
To effectively guarantee resilience and flexibility while being scalable, a multi-tiered infrastructure was incorporated.
The web server was installed in a private subnet in a multi-AZ cluster for increased availability and security.
We have configured CloudWatch to monitor the server’s CPU utilization using default and custom metrics.
Simple Email Service (SES) was utilized to send OTP during login and event-related emails.
Amazon Web Services Infrastructural Services Used
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2)
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (Amazon ELB)
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES)
Amazon Virtual Private Gateway (Amazon VGW)
Amazon Site-to-Site VPN connection (Amazon S2S VPN)
Amazon GuardDuty (AWS GuardDuty)
Amazon Network Address Translation Gateway (AWS NAT Gateway)
Amazon Internet Gateway (Amazon IGW)
Amazon Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF)
Amazon Identity and Access Management (Amazon IAM)
Microsoft Services Used
Microsoft Windows Operating System
Microsoft.NET / .NET Core framework
Microsoft IIS Manager
Microsoft Active Directory
Active Directory Users & Groups
Microsoft SQL Server Standard Edition
Project Start Date: 03-05-2022
Project End Date: 15-06-2022
The Benefits
Saving on On-premises infrastructure cost
The cost of on-premises infrastructure, as well as costs related to on-site hardware procurement, maintenance, energy use, server room leasing, etc., decreased by hosting infrastructure on the AWS Cloud.
Achieved infra level High Availability with Multi AZ RDS
In addition to Amazon EC2 high availability, we have configured instance level high availability with the aid of Windows failover clustering and a Multi AZ RDS for the database.
Shifting from traditional IaaS DB hosting to the PaaS offering (MS-SQL RDS)
Once the application was hosted using RDS based on MS-SQL Standard Edition for both Prod & UAT DB, the client benefited from some of its key features like high availability, automatic backup, patch management, etc., which decreased the overall hassle for the client on both the licensing part and the manageability part.
Backup with unlimited storage with S3
Local database and application file backups are slated to shift to S3 since it provides backup with unlimited storage, which will reduce the cost of backup storage.
On-demand Cost Optimization
We have scheduled an AWS Lambda code to automatically start and stop Amazon EC2 servers from 9 AM to 11 PM in accordance with customer working hours, which will save money on on-demand instances.
About Pentagon System and Services Pvt Ltd
Pentagon System and Services Pvt Ltd is a leading Infrastructure service provider and System Integrator with a presence across India and Singapore.
Established more than two decades ago, we cater to over 1200+ Enterprises and SMEs with highly experienced teams for sales, consultants and a vast pool of skilled engineers supporting their mission-critical environments, which covers multi-vendor, multi-platform infrastructure.
We are an advanced tier Consulting Partners with Amazon Web Services and are also a certified Solution Provider. We serve more than 100 plus customers across segments and verticals with our expertise on the cloud platform.
Solution Architecture Diagram
