A Global Software Developer And SaaS Provider

A leading software company hosts its financial asset management application with NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India - scores on availability

The asset manager is an innovative online personal finance tool. It helps customers plan, track and grow their finances smartly using appropriate tools. An innovative application from a leading financial software developer, it is already a popular tool worldwide, and launched recently in India. The application is made available on a leading bank’s website for its customers and also on a leading financial services portal for its registered users. So when the customer’s partner for product engineering searched for a data center and hosting solutions provider, they started off with a few options. Read more to understand how and why they partnered with NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India.

Business Case

The asset manager application developed by the customer is a personal finance management tool that allows their customers to plan, track and grow their money. When the Indian version of the application was launched, high availability and accessibility were major contributors towards customer satisfaction.

The said application was to be made available to customers through various third-party financial websites due to which the visitor traffic to the portal was expected to be high. Since this was Intuit’s first offering in Indian market, a lot depended on the availability, performance and application support of this application. Security of customer data was also a key concern as the application dealt with personal financial details of people using the application. The customer realized that they required a highly available, secure, and scalable IT infrastructure which offered flexibility with respect to bandwidth usage and colocation space.

Since managing it in-house would put additional burden on their existing IT resources primarily located in the US and Western geography. Support from India for India-centric offering was required. They decided to partner with a managed IT hosting service provider.

Solution

NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, provided end-to-end application hosting support for the customer’s asset management portal.

• IDC and Managed hosting – Colocation – 10 Full Racks, Burstable Bandwidth – upto 100 mbps, Firewall, Shared SAN
• Infrastructure Management – 24x7x365 Monitoring and Management of the entire infrastructure stack through NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, flagship Inframonitor and Inframanage services.
• Managed Security services – 24x7x365 Network attack monitoring and security operations support through CNAM services
• Messaging & Collaboration
• PetaVault back up services, with primary backup in one datacenter and moving secured second copy electronically to second datacenter for BCP

Key Benefits

The customer was able to realize the following benefits as a result of hosting the asset manager application at NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, Tier III ISO 27001-datacenter facility:

• High availability of the IT infrastructure and bandwidth along with 99.99% uptime to accommodate increase in visitor traffic on the portal ensured enhanced and consistent customer experience.
• Enhanced security for the personal financial details of its customers as per ISO 27001 guidelines
• Efficient data back-up and recovery services
• A combination of 24x7x365 infrastructure support services through a NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, Shared NOC and a dedicated team (DNOC) for managing the Application Operations led to increased service performance levels for the application/portal of their end customers.

Business Scenario

The asset manager application is a popular personal money management tool across the globe. So when the customer launched the Indian version of the application, they wanted to partner with a reliable managed IT hosting service provider.

As the application would be made available through various portals, the hosting service provider would have to interact with multiple third-party vendors for managing the application. The customer sought a service provider who had the expertise to offer end-to-end support for the application including hardware, applications, database and storage management. In particular the customer sought a service provider who could offer them:

• High availability and uptime for the portal
• Focused Application Operations support
• A secure, hosting environment as their application dealt with personal finances of customers
   

They shortlisted a list of vendors and finally chose NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, for their proven track record and expertise in hosting such applications.

Value Proposition

NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India's team worked in close co-ordination with the customer to understand their requirement for a highly available, secure and a scalable IT infrastructure. Based on these requirements, NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, proposed a Hybrid Service Delivery Model where the customer can leverage the expertise of NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India's larger Infrastructure management operations team besides customer focused dedicated team for application operations. Through the hybrid service delivery model, the customer gets the advantage of paying per devise per month (resources based costing model) that is cost efficient and a dedicated NOC team which understands their IT environment and processes.

The scope of engagement with the customer involved end-to-end application and infrastructure support to the asset manager application. The solution included:
 

• 24x7x365 application and infrastructure support to asset manager application hosted at NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, DC in Mumbai
• Application operation support to a complimentary Application Hosted at its US Datacenter)
• Coordination with third party vendors including banks, financial portals, IIT/IAM/LiveCommunity/Mtalk, Redhat, Dell, Cisco, F5, EMC, Oracle
• Server Management with 90+ servers for the production, staging and integration processes
• Managed security services including real-time threat detection using log monitoring and periodic vulnerability assessments of the infrastructure components
• Storage Area Network (SAN) Management
• Application Management – Jboss (IMM/IDF), Tomcat (IAM/BI),Open SSO, Ping-Federate, Apache, NetAcuity, Wily, Splunk, Custom Shell Script
• OS / Application Support
  • OS Management & Deployment
  • Security & Patch Management
  • Application Upgrade
  • Backup Management
• Oracle Database Management Support
  • DB Management
  • DB Encryption
  • DB Replication
  • DB Backup & Restoration

NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, worked towards improving several features in the alpha and beta stages including bettering the planning and scaling mechanisms, recovery plans, upstream and downstream communications and a better canvas of integration with third party vendors. With these improvements in place, the application successfully went live in 2011.

Key Takeaways

Today the asset management application is available on leading portals and banks for customers to access. The customer has had no issues with the availability and the security standards offered by NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India. Consumers today use the asset manager application widely and they enjoy a seamless, rich experience with the application. Some of the benefits extended through this partnership include:

• High availability of the IT infrastructure and bandwidth along with 99.99% uptime to accommodate increase in visitor traffic on the portal ensured enhanced and consistent customer experience
• Enhanced security for the personal financial details of its customers as per ISO 27001 guidelines
• Efficient data back-up and 24x7x365 network support services through a dedicated Network Operation Center (NOC) led to increased performance levels for the application/portal
   

NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, is currently building a Site Level DR for the customer at NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India's Chennai DC.