Protecting Data Integrity and Expanding Capacity: A Financial Institution’s Cloud Migration Journey
Protecting Data Integrity and Expanding Capacity: A Financial Institution’s Cloud Migration Journey
REGION
United Arab Emirates
COMPANY TYPE
Foreign Exchange
INDUSTRY
Financial Services
CLOUD SOLUTION
Migrating the AML application to AWS solved the customer’s challenges, simplified operations, saved costs, provided data locality, and ensured smooth AML application performance
THE CUSTOMER
Over the last four decades, a prominent financial institution has emerged as a leader in providing Money/Currency Exchange, Remittance, and WPS services in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and the United Arab Emirates. The institution, backed by a renowned group, boasts a legacy spanning over six decades, with diversified business interests across various sectors. From a single office in Dubai’s Deira to several branches across the UAE, the institution has consolidated its position as a leading provider of financial services, offering customers the highest quality standards in conducting currency exchange and money remittances.
From a single office in Dubai’s Deira to several branches across the UAE, the institution has consolidated its position as the best currency exchange for the UAE. Their customers and partners have benefitted from the highest quality standards in conducting currency exchange and money remittances. With the assurance of the best currency exchange rates in Dubai and UAE, they offer their customers an array of products and services.
THE CHALLENGE
The institution encountered a significant challenge with its AML (Anti-Money Laundering) application. It required a lot of computing power, but its on-premises setup couldn’t scale easily. Expanding its infrastructure meant dealing with costly capital expenditures (CAPEX) and long waits for procuring new hardware. They required a solution to handle their scalability needs without the upfront costs and delays.
The AML application components were stateful, deployed across multiple servers, and stored permanent data on each server, preventing using horizontal scale due to data persistence requirements.
They also faced challenges with the sensitivity of the data and the need to keep the data locality in the UAE. Additionally, the planning and communication process between Bespin, vendors, and the institution’s team presented several challenges.
THE SOLUTION
At first, the institution’s team was skeptical of the public cloud’s ability to meet their challenges, Bespin suggested initially doing a POC for running their AML application on AWS, to evaluate whether AWS could overcome all the customer challenges and address any other concerns. After completing the POC migration and addressing all the client concerns, they approved moving forward with the next step: migrating the AML workload to AWS Cloud.
In the planning phase of the actual migration, Bespin and the institution invested in building a comprehensive migration plan with a detailed RACI matrix that described all stakeholders’ roles and responsibilities – project managers, Bespin Technical, customer IT, application owners, and the application vendor.
“The collaborative efforts between Bespin and the customer during the planning phase were instrumental in facilitating a seamless workload migration and the modernization of application components to appropriate AWS managed services” – according to Mohammad Jomaa, a DevOps engineer at Bespin.
- Amazon EC2 with attached SSD EBS volumes were implemented to address the resources’ scalability demand of AML application. Amazon EBS can scale up easily based on the storage requirements without interrupting the underlying application. While Amazon EC2 can provide a vertical scalability option by increasing and decreasing the instance size, Bespin prepared a dynamic AWS CLI script for these operations.
- Bespin collaborated with the customer Network team to configure the network integration between AWS and the client’s on-premises environment. A VPN tunnel was established to guarantee the secure transfer of sensitive data throughout the migration process, ensuring its confidentiality and integrity.
- Bespin proposed a migration strategy involving the setup of fresh servers, allowing the vendor to install and configure application components with the latest version of the application on the latest version of the applicable OS. For the database migration, a replication from Oracle Database on a virtual machine to Amazon RDS for Oracle was initiated. Data was continuously synced, enabling a seamless application switchover from old servers to AWS by simply updating the DNS records and minimizing downtime.
- To reduce the costs of running a big-sized FTP server on AWS, Bespin suggested moving the files to Amazon S3 while using the managed service AWS Transfer Family to serve the SFTP service to access migrated data.
THE EXECUTION
After successfully migrating the client’s AML application to AWS, the final state of the migration comprised the following AWS Services.
- Amazon EC2: AML servers deployed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a scalable computing service designed for handling high workloads and providing resizable compute capacity in the cloud. learn more
- AWS Transfer Family with Amazon S3: Utilizing AWS Transfer Family alongside Amazon S3 as the backend infrastructure, the AML app streamlines SFTP through the managed service, ensuring efficient data management and storage while minimizing administrative overhead. learn more
- Amazon EBS: The Application data was migrated to SSD Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 for both throughput and transaction-intensive workloads at any scale. learn more
- AWS KMS: utilized to encrypt data at rest, enhancing data security by safeguarding stored information and ensuring that the data remains confidential and integral while stored in the system.
- Amazon RDS for Oracle: a managed service employed to serve and maintain the Oracle database in a scalable and efficient manner. It ensures high availability, durability, and database performance, meeting the AML’s requirements.
RESULTS & BENEFITS
Bespin deployed the AML app in AWS with full functionality in terms of security and performance. The collaboration between Bespin, the vendor, and the client IT teams played a core role in successfully completing the migration journey where all challenges were overcome, minimizing downtime.
The client has experienced substantial enhancements through migrating its AML application to AWS. This transition has resulted in several key benefits. Firstly, by leveraging AWS infrastructure and the latest hardware/CPU generations, the performance of the AML application has been notably improved.
Additionally, the application’s scalability has been greatly enhanced, as AWS allows for the seamless adjustment of resources based on demand, ensuring optimal performance while optimizing costs.
Moreover, AWS’s robust security features and compliance certifications have bolstered the overall security posture of the AML application, offering comprehensive protection for sensitive financial data.
Furthermore, the migration to AWS has enabled the client to realize significant cost savings by eliminating upfront infrastructure investments, paying only for the resources utilized, and taking advantage of AWS’s flexible pricing models.
Lastly, by hosting their application in the AWS UAE region, the client ensures compliance with data locality regulations, maintaining its data within the country’s borders and meeting regulatory requirements.
About Bespin Global, an e& enterprise company:
An AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and AWS Managed Service Partner, BESPIN GLOBAL MEA (Middle East and Africa) is a leading provider of automated cloud solutions and consulting services, including cloud adoption, strategy, migration, implementation, Managed Services, DevOps, FinOps and Data & Analytics. Bespin is positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, as well as a “Visionary” in Gartner’s 2022 Magic Quadrant for IT Transformation Services.
In late 2022, Bespin Global MEA and e& enterprise formed a joint venture with the aim to assist enterprises in their digital transformation journey and eventually become the largest pure-play public cloud-managed and professional services provider in the Middle East, Turkey, Africa, and Pakistan.
Bespin’s cloud FinOps management platform, OpsNow offers an automated end-to-end solution for customers to effectively manage cloud assets and costs, optimize cloud expenses, and automate the implementation of cloud governance policies across multi-cloud environments.
Address: The Offices 4, #138-139, One Central, Dubai World Trade Center (DWTC)
Telephone: 800 BESPIN (237746)
P.O. Box: 340729
