Solution: Managed Services
Field: Insurance
Advizex has the expertise and experience to plan and execute a full-scale migration from an on-premises solution to a cloud-based infrastructure. It’s one of our sweet spots. While each situation is unique, we’ve seen time and time again that the cloud saves our customers money, time, and headaches.
Key Takeaway:
Advizex migrated this long-time client from an on-premises infrastructure to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. We managed the full transition and continue to maintain it.
Advizex Delivery Team: Cloud Managed Services
The Customer.
One of the largest title agencies in its area, this company has partnered with Advizex since 2004. Employing about 300 people and given the nature of the title business, this company transmits large amounts of data quickly between various parties. They also grow their business through innovation, including giving their customers real-time updates and access. This means their IT foundation needs to be solid.
Old-School Infrastructure.
The customer’s in-house IT department consisted of two developers who tapped into Advizex Managed Services on demand to help with their databases. Everything was on-premises, and the business ran on five servers consisting of two Windows, one production database, one Webserver Oracle Web Tier 12, and a beta server that contained both the database and web server.
Their system was homegrown – and the code required major enhancements.
For instance, they were running java processes from the database everywhere, including emails. The company sends out thousands of emails daily, which taxed their databases and hampered performance. They also generated html out of the database, old-school style. They didn’t have a process in place to test and optimize. Essentially, they let their infrastructure run until it broke and then call Advizex to fix it. We’d fix it, and the cycle would repeat.
Running Out of Space.
They kept running out of space. When they maxed out their drive bays and could no longer add space to the servers, the owner and his employees were frustrated. Because their infrastructure was physically hosted by an off-site, third-party entity, they’d have to buy more hardware to get more space. Their costs were already high and in danger of going higher. Even with new hardware, their coding issues remained. Plus, they’d still lack a system to track performance and diagnose issues. In short, their infrastructure was running on borrowed time.
Advizex Cloud Managed Services to the Rescue.
Given our long-standing relationship with the customer, we understood their business. We knew their systems, the challenges, and their overall business goals. After doing our due diligence in comparing the options, moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) made the most sense.
Handling a full transition from on-premises, third-party hosted infrastructure to a complete cloud infrastructure is something Advizex does well. In fact, for this customer, we were on time and under budget.
Everything Improved: 5 Key Benefits.
The benefits gained for this customer are the reasons why Advizex often recommends moving to the cloud. They include:
- Running out of space is no longer an issue. OCI lets them scale up (or down) depending on business needs. And because everything is virtual, there’s no need to buy new hardware. Ever.
- Their monthly costs decreased by 50%, from $4,200 to $2,000. That’s $26,400 savings annually, looking at the original servers. They’ve since added new servers, which is something they couldn’t do before the cloud.
- They saved money on licensing fees. Right off the bat, we saved them $100,000 in fees they had expected to pay.
- Improved their backup process. Prior to moving to OCI, their system took 10 hours each night to back up files. Most of their files are images. Moving to the cloud simplified their sync process – down to about 15 minutes.
- Performance improved, allowing them to fulfill their promises to their customers and their goals for business growth.
Why Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Because this customer was already running on Oracle, transitioning to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was easy. OCI is agnostic when it comes to the tech stacks, making it flexible enough to integrate open-source technologies. This helped us save the customer even more money. Now, truly, the customer can take advantage of all that Oracle offers.
With Advizex Cloud Managed Services, Performance Continues to Improve.
Given our successes with transitioning from on-premises to OCI, this customer partners with Advizex Cloud Managed Services. We’ve moved from an on-demand vendor to a trusted partner.
Because their systems are cloud based, we can spot issues and fix them. For instance, once in the cloud, we optimized capacity from 90% to 60% in just two days. We could see a spike in usage happening and investigate it. We found numerous performance issues and fixed them all. Even the owner is looking at the cloud’s graphs, because he’s excited about his company’s now solid foundation.
“Everything we promote about moving to the cloud, they’ve experienced: improvements in performance, capacity, flexibility and backup – all while reducing costs.” – Dale Costantino, EVP Cloud Managed Services
THE ADVIZEX TEAM
Key team members include:
- Dale Costantino, EVP Cloud Managed Services
- Bradley Gibson, Senior Solutions Architect
- Alwyn Santos, Practice Director, Database