Client
Our client, a prominent water utility company, stands as a cornerstone in the provision of vital water supply and wastewater services to millions of customers across the UK. With a steadfast commitment to ensuring clean and accessible water for both residential and commercial users, our client plays a pivotal role in maintaining the nation’s water infrastructure
Challenge
Our client’s Enterprise Performance Manager (EPM) application, which is the reporting dashboard for data from a wide range of data sources, was facing multiple issues. It is used to schedule and generate a wide range of reports used by multiple verticals.
The output of EPM reports is used to meet regulatory and non-regulatory reports. The biggest consumers of these reports were Water Service delivery, Asset Strategy and Policy, and Wastewater Service Delivery respectively.
The application and the servers that host it were malfunctioning, and hence our client needed to consider how to provide alternative functionality or upgrade the EPM to meet and exceed current business requirements.
Given the vast number of regulatory reports it supported, if it were to sustain a large-scale system error it would have a monumental impact. The errors could lead to the business not being able to access mission-critical data impacting operations and regulatory commitments from a governance and operation point of view. The key risks were:
- Application functionality was not developed in line with the required business needs.
- Application component fixes were not available in a timely manner.
- Unintuitive user interface that crashed frequently.
- Scheduled reports were not executing correctly.
Unoptimized Azure Cloud for the Application
The customer had the application already hosted on Azure but several challenges persisted:
- Several issues in the Azure applications required significant architectural or application change.
- The Azure cloud infrastructure was widely underutilized, leading to ever-increased OPEX costs.
- The backup mechanism was expensive and inefficient.
- Standard policies were not consistently applied across the platform.
Solution
Azure Cloud Optimization
Hexaware implemented its proven cloud management methodology to optimize the client’s infrastructure on Azure. We architected a high-availability design leveraging availability zones, redundancy, and failover. Utilizing our CloudOps best practices, we boosted security, instituted controls, and set up robust monitoring.
- Monitoring configured with appropriate alert thresholds for all infrastructure and key infrastructure components.
- Infrastructure was appropriately sized to avoid unnecessary costs.
- All infrastructure and data were backed up with the recovery point objective (RPO) of 1 hour and an recovery time objective (RTO) of 8 hours.
- Security best practices were employed across all components.
Migration of historic data: 50-year-old data distributed across clusters
We migrated a huge volume of data from Oracle (telemetry) and SANTA (SQL) servers to enable our client to visualize the historical data as well as generate appropriate reports. All the tables from Oracle had data starting from 2014 to be migrated and SANTA had data starting from 1954 to be migrated using Azure safe deployment practice (SDP) framework.
Benefits
Hexaware transformed the client’s ability to reliably run critical applications by implementing a resilient, secure, cost-optimized cloud environment, which resulted in:
- IT Service Effectiveness
- Reliable update and patch testing in pre-production
- A robust and tested recovery plan
Summary
The client now leverages Hexaware’s cloud management expertise to drive lean, resilient, secure operations for its vital applications. Hexaware provides comprehensive CloudOps capabilities enabling the client to harness the cloud’s full potential.
