Fastest Growing Non-Banking Financial Company - Cloud Adoption

Challenges

SML Finance, as a leading Non-Banking Financial Institution in India with over 50000 customer base, is expanding faster in the NBFC sector. As a step to grow further, they decided to evaluate their current on-premise private cloud system in which their banking IT application was running and realized that the prevailing solution was not addressing the desired performance efficiency. They also believe that to ride this growth wave efficiently, it is very important for them to adopt Smart Technology.

Another reason that causes their decision to move to cloud stronger was the necessity to secure the system, satisfying all the compliance obligations with granular visibility and access control standards.

Moreover, increase in operational efficiency and cost-cutting were also their major focus on moving to the cloud.

Keeping all the above factors into consideration, the business decided to leverage the benefits of the public cloud by moving their private cloud system to Azure.

Goals

The Client approached Crozaint to migrate their workload to Azure cloud. They needed to enforce strong security and control over the cloud solution, thus ensuring high availability by eliminating the single point of failure. Also, they wanted to build a multi-region disaster recovery environment requiring RTO & RPO of less than 15 minutes.

Another major goal was to depreciate the operations and enhance the stability of database systems of their Banking application by achieving minimal cut overtime with a rollback plan to mitigate business continuity risk. Importantly, they needed to evaluate the Azure cloud against the NBFC related compliances & regulations.

Solutions

Our Azure architects conducted an exhaustive study of the environment, provisioned infrastructure and assisted the migration of current workloads to Azure. We have implemented FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) VPN gateway for their Azure network and restricted access control systems through it.

The entire workload was replicated in another virtual network in an Azure region using Azure Site Recovery(ASR) with peering enabled between both virtual networks across regions. Regular backups were maintained using Azure Backups and stored in Azure Storage Account which helps in achieving Recover Point Management, Data Tiering, Resilience, and availability.

We have integrated auditing controls, notification, and workflow detective for the Azure cloud system.

Crozaint Partnership

Crozaint was recommended by the Microsoft team to help the customer to adopt cloud technology.

Results with Crozaint

• Improved Performance – The customer leveraged flexibility and elasticity that comes with the Azure environment. The new environment had the ability to scale up on demand and handle hundreds of checkouts per minute.
• Lower financial risk – Crozaint team helped in reducing the company’s financial risk by moving from a CAPEX based to OPEX based. The customer is now utilizing the agility of the system by running UAT servers only for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.
• Reduced Cost – Customer was able to decrease its operational costs by 27% after migrating to Azure.
• Improved Scalability – The customer achieved the ability to scale the application as and when required by leveraging auto-scaling and load balancing features of VMSS.
• Competitive Advantages – Adopting Azure has let our customer to keep their focus on the business and provided them with both strategic and tactical advantages.

In general, Migration was done successfully with cut overtime of fewer than 5 minutes and achieved RPO and RTO of less than 10 mins.

About the Client

SML Finance Ltd, an NBFC (approved by RBI), is a leading asset finance company engaged in the business of dealing with financial and monetary transactions. SML encompasses a broad range of business operations within the financial services including innovative loan products, Gold loans, vehicle loans, and deposit schemes. SML Finance has grown to have offices across India catering to a staggering 50,000 plus satisfied customers.