Making Hay While the Cloud Shines

Every enterprise is different and their priorities vary when it comes to IT. Lets look at Apeejay Group. This is a five generations old family run business with diversified interests that spans pharmaceuticals, chemicals, merchant banking, merchant trading, publishing, rural agriculture and education among others. The group is spread across 52 locations in India and five international locations including Germany, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Dubai, and the US.

Such a diversified multi-vertical operations certainly calls for business enabling technologies that can bring in operational and business excellence. But putting an IT backbone given the company's size indeed was a daunting task. Given the geographical spread, Apeejay was facing multiple tech challenges that ranged from collaborating, collating and accessing information across multiple geographies round the clock and and top of that putting in place an effective security backbone topped its agenda.

As we look at the pre-existing IT set up at Apeejay, it was a mixed bag and they had tried out so many different tech interventions. For instance, Apeejay was using different solutions. Earlier it adopted virtualization et al as it had on-premises data centers hosted in India and outside. But despite all these they were unable to arrive at a seamless IT backbone. It is in this backdrop Apeejay leadership thought of partnering with cloud vendor who could take complete ownership of IT-that made a lot of sense.

TECH DUE DILIGENCE

Before evaluating solutions by different vendors, Apeejay team laid down some parameters aimed at zeroing on the right and best solution available in the market. In the end it took the cloud plunge. It also created a roadmap and listed its expectations from the cloud roll out. The key things it considered were:

• Not to get locked in or forced into using propriety software. It looked at open source technologies.
• The solution must optimize the infrastructure and provide a better level of service as the group has a large number of legacy applications which were neither optimized for the web nor run in the latest operating systems.
• To be able to easily and quickly replicate internal networking rather than having to do a complex long term migration.
• To securely centralize data and have a more granular control over it.
• Bigger RoI and lower TCO

THE EUREKA MOMENT

After screening various solutions, the management identified that Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the right solution. According to company sources, one of the key considerations for choosing AWS was the price and performance parameters that went well with Appejay. Additionally, AWS ‘pay as you go' model also augured well and acted as leverage for cost-effective backup infrastructure and capacity optimization.

"The cost savings we have experienced using the AWS cloud platform have been astronomical. We have been able to save about 80% of what our IT expenses used to be. We no longer need to invest capital in over-provisioning servers which were needed only for 3-4 months in a year for spikes in usage," observes Aditya Berlia, Co-Founder and Pro-Chancellor of the Apeejay Stya University and a member of the Management Board of the Svran Group and the Apeejay Stya Group. "We also did away with dealing tape drive decks and running physical restoration drills. This saves us tremendous amount of time that allows us to focus on other important aspects of our business," adds Aditya.

With this, Apeejay group was able to reduce their hardware costs as software is already in the cloud and the only expense was sundry peripherals.

Currently the group is using a number of AWS cloud services which include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Cloud Front.

CLOUD DELIVERABLES

Innovation and Productivity: Huge decrease in the downtime. For example, if a computer stops working, the only time consumed is one taken by the IT technician to replace the computer or laptop in the field, as everything else is already in the cloud.

Flexibility and Scalability: Most of their enterprise IT applications are customized and run on AWS, including financial software, Tally. The Amazon Virtual Private cloud is highly robust and gives them the ability to replicate their entire architecture on AWS with innovative ways to optimize the use of infrastructure resources.

Enables Agility and Collaboration within the Company: With the AWS cloud platform, group no longer needs to synchronize over 30 identity servers. They now have a single identity and access management system throughout the group which gives better control.