Case Study Archive

November 03, 2023 | Resonances type: Case study

About the company

Cholamandalam Investment and Finance Company Limited (Chola), incorporated in 1978 as the financial services arm of the Murugappa Group, has emerged as a comprehensive financial services provider. Chola offers a range of services, including vehicle finance, home loans, SME loans, and more. With operations across 1,204 branches in India and assets under management exceeding INR 1,147.95 billion (approximately USD 15.5 billion), Chola is committed to enhancing the lives of its 2.74 million customers while upholding strong ethical values and a commitment to all stakeholders.

Customer Challenges

Chola was confronted with a critical need for seamless and controlled software deployments. Lacking an in-house development team, they heavily relied on external vendors, leading to a fragmented landscape with multiple vendors and disjointed deployment pipelines. This approach resulted in operational challenges, exacerbated by a continuous influx of change requests from end customers and insurance aggregators. These challenges led to significant downtimes, negatively affecting the end-user experience. To address this, Chola aimed to establish a centralized repository to streamline and govern the deployment process for improved efficiency and consistency.

Minfy’s Solution

Application Discovery:

Minfy initiated the solution by conducting a comprehensive application discovery process, which included identifying the number of applications in Chola's ecosystem, profiling the application stack, and identifying dependencies. This insight provided a clear understanding of Chola's application landscape and was pivotal for the subsequent DevOps activities.

DevOps Solution Setup Activities:

• AWS Cognito with SAML against ADFS + MFA: Minfy implemented AWS Cognito with SAML authentication against ADFS, enhancing security with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).
• AWS Code Commit Repo Setup: Minfy established AWS Code Commit repositories, offering a secure and efficient version control system for Chola's applications
• Jenkins Master and Slave Setup: Minfy configured Jenkins Master and Slave (Windows) environments as per the proposed specifications. Additionally, they integrated AWS Cognito with Connect ID and set up an S3 bucket for enhanced functionality.
• Sonarqube with AWS ADFS SAML Integration: Minfy integrated Sonarqube with AWS ADFS for seamless Single Sign-On (SSO) access and efficient code quality analysis.
• CICD Pipeline Configuration: Minfy created CodeCommit repositories for the identified applications and established Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CICD) pipeline scripts, ensuring streamlined code deployment.
• Source Code Commit: Chola's development team and vendors were provided access to commit source code to AWS Code Commit, facilitating collaborative development.
• Deployment, Validation, and UAT Deployment: The solution included deploying the code to the development environment, validating its accuracy and functionality with input from the development team, and then merging and deploying it to UAT servers for comprehensive testing and quality assurance.

Challenges Faced by Minfy During Implementation:

A notable challenge encountered by Minfy during the implementation was the integration of SAML with Jenkins while implementing Active Directory (AD) authentication. A hurdle in this process was the absence of native support for AD authentication in Jenkins. Chola's requirement to onboard multiple vendors onto the AD system further added complexity, especially with their strong preference for avoiding the creation of separate logins for Jenkins. The overarching goal was to ensure that vendors who were already authenticated by the AD could effortlessly access Jenkins without the need for additional login credentials.

To address this challenge, Minfy effectively resolved the issue by enabling AD authentication using AWS Cognito. This solution streamlined the login process for vendors authenticated by the AD, eliminating the need for separate Jenkins credentials. This strategic implementation not only tackled the SAML integration issue but also provided a seamless experience for Chola's users, simplifying access to Jenkins and improving overall efficiency and security within the DevOps ecosystem.

Business Outcomes

Minfy's comprehensive solution effectively addressed Chola's pressing challenges, resulting in transformative outcomes. By streamlining software deployments and fostering collaboration among multiple vendors, Minfy reduced time to deployment and market by 40%, facilitating faster and more agile development cycles. Additionally, the integration of Sonarqube significantly enhanced Chola's security posture, improving code quality and fortifying the codebase. This holistic approach not only tackled Chola's initial challenges related to fragmented deployments but also laid the foundation for heightened efficiency, security, and competitiveness within the evolving landscape of DevOps.

October 05, 2023 | Resonances type: Case study

Overview

In recent years, there is a trend of technological transformation in the businesses all around the globe. We are in the midst of digital transformation, where every organisation is putting resources to foster innovation, and to adapt with the market and customers need. Organizations are democratizing the data with collaborative efforts. Ayur.AI is in a similar bandwagon, where Minfy is helping Ayur.AI in solving some of the pressing issues of our time in the healthcare domain, collectively.

Ayur.AI has a deep domain knowledge and understanding of holistic healthcare practices to transform healthcare into a more proactive, preventive, and patient-centric experience by combining Ayurveda with modern science.

To support Ayur.AI achieve their vision, Minfy identified three broad areas of collaboration in their service and product offerings as below:

1. AI had patient data in unstructured formats such as images and PDFs. Hence, they faced challenges in utilizing that data to advance their service and product offerings.
2. AI wanted to track a patient’s progress over time and to perform advanced analytics to achieve a more proactive and preventive approach.
3. AI wanted to better manage their ayurvedic nutraceutical products listing by understanding the emotions around a particular product so that they could make better, and data driven recommendations to the customers.

Solution Offerings

Solution 1: Data Digitization

The process of converting unstructured data into structured/semi-structured data involves several steps, including data extraction from documents, data cleaning and pre-processing, data mapping, data standardization, and data normalization. After these steps are completed, the data is typically stored, analysed, and used to generate insights.

AWS offers an array of tools and services to assist healthcare stakeholders in unlocking the full potential of their data. Our solution utilizes various AWS services like Amazon Textract to process a small sample of documents, extracting relevant data and standardizing for further processing.

Extraction: The foundation of utilizing unstructured healthcare data lies in the extraction of relevant information from various sources such as images, PDFs, and scanned documents. This process involves leveraging the power of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) algorithms and tools, such as the widely available services like Amazon Textract. These algorithms and tools enable us to recognize, extract, and define output from the unstructured data, making it machine-readable and ready for further analysis.

We used Amazon Textract to perform the OCR and digitize the data. An instance of a sample lab investigation report ran through Textract to get the extracted information in the CSV or Excel format.

The corresponding output file of the unstructured document:

Processing: Once the data is extracted, we are standardizing it to a uniform format for meaningful comparison and calculations. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques play a vital role in extracting valuable information from textual data. This feature allows a healthcare provider to look from the complete document and get an understanding of mapping of what were the diagnoses, symptoms, treatments and qualities etc.

Data Mapping, Normalization, & Standardization: The extracted data is diverse and needs to be transformed to a common scale to facilitate meaningful comparison and calculations. We transformed the data into the standard forms to ensure homogeneity of medical concepts across different datasets.

Because data ontology plays a crucial role in establishing a common ground for understanding the data, thereby enhancing the accuracy and relevance of analyses by defining the relationships between different medical concepts.

Solution 2: Advanced Analytics and Visualizations on Patient Data

We have successfully extracted, cleaned, and pre-processed the data. As a result, it is now structured and ready to be used for analytics and visualizations. We started with performing a descriptive analysis of the patient data to gain insights into their current health status. We used Amazon QuickSight to create dashboards that visualize the medical data.

For instance, we had patient lab investigation reports, and we had extracted the information along with unique identifiers such as UHID. We then performed the necessary preliminary steps to ensure that the data is usable.

Our descriptive analytics involved creating a dashboard that displays vitals trends, health parameters abnormalities, a timeline view of medical events, the distribution of normality, and the classification of parameters based on abnormality. We also included a health parameter value change indicator to compare the changes during a specific period.

These powerful visualization techniques would enable healthcare professionals to determine patterns, trends, and correlations within the data - providing valuable insights into patient health, current stage of the disease and potential medical outcomes.

Solution 3: AI Powered Sentiment Analysis of Nutraceutical Product Reviews

For performing the sentiment analysis, Minfy used their in-house solution – Sentiment.ai. Sentiment.ai is a solution that uses AI/ML to analyse the sentiment of text data to understand the emotions and opinions.

With the help of Sentiment.ai, we enabled Ayur.AI to better understand the customer emotions about products, make data-driven and informed decisions, and provided real-time analytics, trend detection, and sentiment tracking to capture the pulse of customer sentiment.

The analysis helped Ayur.AI to accurately understand the sentiment of customers, proactively addressing the detected issues or concerns, and finally to use transparent and data-driven approach. Overall, the solution enhanced customer satisfaction, personalized marketing strategies, optimized product assortment and improved Ayur.AI’ s reputation across retailers.

Outcomes

The following outcomes were achieved by Ayur.AI during their collaboration with Minfy:

Effective Data Utilization: Ayur.AI successfully transitioned from unstructured data formats like images and PDFs to structured data. The data digitization process enabled Ayur.AI to harness valuable insights from previously untapped data sources.

Proactive Healthcare Approach: With the ability to track patient progress over time, Ayur.AI adopted a proactive and preventive approach to healthcare. Advanced analytics provided a comprehensive view of patient health, leading to informed decision-making for doctors.

Data-Driven Decision-Making for Products: Ayur.AI gained a deeper understanding of customer emotions and opinions regarding their nutraceutical products listing. Real-time sentiment analysis empowered Ayur.AI to make data-driven decisions, updating listing of products in real-time.

Conclusion

Healthcare systems are at a critical juncture in the dynamic world of smart healthcare. While fundamental principles and systems have been in use for a long time, the introduction of new technologies opens a wide range of opportunities for growth and advancement.

The adoption of technological developments has moved from voluntary to mandatory in a fast-expanding healthcare market. It is the path that will allow us to provide efficient, patient-centric care, ultimately leading to better health outcomes for everyone.

As a result, it is critical that we work together, push the boundaries, and truly embrace the transformative force of innovation as we journey towards a future where healthcare’s potential is limitless.

Co-Author - Dr. Bala Pesala | Founder & CEO, Ayur.AI

Co-Author – Yedhu Krishnan B | Senior Full Stack Developer, Ayur.AI

Author – Gaurav Lohkna | Data Scientist, Minfy

September 08, 2023 | Resonances type: Case study

About Customer

Pos Malaysia is the national courier service provider and sole licensee for universal postal services in the country, delivering to more than 10 million addresses across the nation. With a track record of over 200 years, the Pos Malaysia Group has progressed from a traditional
postal service into a dynamic mail and parcel services, financial services and supply chain solutions provider with the largest delivery and touchpoint network in Malaysia. Pos Malaysia’s Integrated Parcel Centre (IPC) was upgraded to process over 300,000 items a day. With the growing demand, Pos Malaysia incorporates various technologies to deliver several services to its customers and to realize its vision, “We deliver. We connect. We improve lives.”

Challenges

Pos Malaysia’s existing business model uses on-premises data centers for storing and processing all the data generated across different services. The company stores a large amount of data on-premises database which is used by different business units for data processing, transformation and further analysis. As the company is seeing an increase in orders, they are looking forward to leveraging cloud technology to build a data warehouse for data analytics. The company wants to build an end-to-end ML pipeline using this data warehouse to incorporate advanced ML algorithms that can predict ETA (Estimated Arrival Time). The company is also faced with challenges like scaling during data spikes and vertical scaling for heavy workloads. A secure solution to maintain and monitor different APIs for delivering integrated solutions. The company is therefore looking for a cost-effective solution that can address the above requirements and reduce its operational overheads. Being an AWS premier partner, Minfy brings in a range of deep cloud expertise in migration and modernization. Minfy believes that the client can modernize its database for scalability and security and leverage serverless architecture for its workflows. Minfy proposes various data analytics services offered by AWS for building advanced data analysis and ML pipelines enabling the company to be more agile in delivering its solution.

Current Scenario

• The data resided in different databases. The client wanted a data warehouse solution to help its business units to access the right data and perform analytics in real time removing the existing manual interventions to fetch the data.
• The client wanted to enhance the user experience of their customers by reducing the time to predict the estimated arrival time. During peak time, the APIs took a long time to respond.
• Owing to the pandemic, there was a negative impact on the delivery time for parcels which significantly affected the estimated arrival time. The client wanted to revise and run an ML model to predict the ETA with a low margin of error.
• The client required a pipeline that can process data in batches and persist it to a NoSQL database for fast retrieval. Monitoring the APIs was becoming a challenge as the traffic in the overall application has increased to over a million requests daily.

Solution Offered

Transit Gateway was configured to establish a secure connection between the Virtual Private Connection in the cloud with the on-premises database/application.
• AWS API Gateway was configured to host and manage the private API service as a private API endpoint. It enables the client with functionalities like API keys for partner validation. Rate-limiting usage in order to implement throttling and handling unwanted spikes in usage.
• The basic level of validations of API requests was configured using API Gateway which also assists in maintaining multiple versions for the next phase releases.
• AWS Lambda was configured as a computer service triggered by API Gateway upon request. Lambda transforms the request into a valid API call for the Dynamo DB query and responds back with the relevant information.
• Dynamo DB was configured to store the connote ids of the parcel with an internal trigger to create a data lifecycle in order to purge legacy data from storage. Dynamo DB was configured as a key-value pair storage service which is a fast, scalable, and, flexible NoSQL database for low-latency data
• AWS Redshift was configured as the data warehouse system to store the data and create business reports.
• AWS Batch is a trigger-based service that will be used to create either event-based or time-based triggers in order to extract the delta data from Redshift on a periodic basis and process the data into the input set for Sagemaker
• AWS Sagemaker endpoint was configured for predicting ETA using ML algorithms.
• AWS Batch retrieves the output from SageMaker and pushes it into Dynamo DB for storage. The table structure was decided based on output structure from SageMaker.
• AWS S3 is the data source where the data extracted from the OAL database is stored.
• AWS Glue was configured to preprocess the raw data to relevant data structure for the data warehouse. It also helps in validating the data set and correcting any duplication-related errors.
• Key Management Service (KMS) was configured with the database services to ensure data encryption at rest. HTTPS API with certificate hosted in ACM was used to ensure data encryption in transit.
• CloudWatch was configured to monitor all the services being used in the architecture. It helped set up alerts in case infrastructure usage goes beyond expected parameters and assists in having automated resolutions for the same.

Results and Benefits

• Using API Gateway, the client was able to handle a huge number of requests. They were further able to reduce the cost using the tiered pricing model of this service. Since API Gateway is a fully managed service, the client was also able to reduce the operational efforts in managing the APIs and tracking requests.
• Since Lambda was querying results from the DynamoDB, the customers got the response from the API with very low latency even during peak traffic.
• Using AWS Glue, Redshift, Batch and Sagemaker, the client was able to implement the ML pipeline to deliver quick results. Using AWS Batch, the client was able to run Batch computing reducing the cost significantly

Customer Background

Founded by Mr. Jaidayal Dalmia in 1939, Dalmia Cements is a pioneering cement company in India. Headquartered in New Delhi, the company operates as a 100% subsidiary of Dalmia Bharat Ltd. The company has a manufacturing capacity of 35.9 million tons per annum (MTPA) across 14 plants and grinding units located in 10 states. With over 33,000 dealers and sub-dealers, the company serves more than 22 states and is a leading player in each region. The company has grown through acquisitions and greenfield expansions to scale and venture into new territories. Dalmia Cement is unique in that it has at least one plant in each of the four major eastern states of West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha.

Challenges

The Dalmia Group has their workloads hosted on-premise and in a third-party data center. An assessment identified a total of 123 servers and 11 applications currently hosted in these locations. They were looking to move their workloads to AWS due to the poor performance of the
prevous data center. The goal is to centralize their infrastructure, modernize their applications, and reduce costs, including license costs. They also want to transform their applications and make them future-ready in order to accelerate innovation.

Business Drivers

Business Driver 1: Private cloud contract extension on the cards, Critical Business Applications & ERPs hosted on the private cloud.
Business Driver 2: Limitations / Constrains on the tech front to scale/innovate their business faster in on-premise infrastructure

Solutions

Minfy leveraged the Migration Acceleration Program to create the business case for migration to AWS. We designed and implemented a
highly-available infrastructure for their SAP workloads on AWS. Additionally, Minfy migrated Dalmia’s critical databases as well as their non-SAP applications. We also defined & implemented a Cloud Operating Model & transitioned Dalmia’s cloud-ops to Minfy’s Managed Services
Support.

About Minfy

Minfy Technologies is a Cloud Native System Integrator helping enterprises, start-ups and fast-growing businesses navigate digital journeys leveraging AI & Cloud technologies. We assist our customers in accelerating Digital Transformation, Cloud Adoption and Innovation. Our transformative services include Cloud Consulting, Migration & Legacy Modernisations, Cloud-Native Application Development and DeepTech implementations while offering reliable and world class 24x7 managed services.

September 01, 2023 | Resonances Type: CaseStudy

Objectives

Cyient & Minfy's collaboration to migrate end-customer's (leading mobile network company) databases on Oracle Commercial Database Engine to OpenSource PostgreSQL for cost-effective scalability & cost management.

• Transform Cyient's Oracle Database to Aurora PostgreSQL for cost savings and reduction of management overheads.
• Reduce heavy Oracle licensing costs.
• Achieve Oracle-grade scale, performance, and HADR with open-source alternatives.
• Based on the success of the aforementioned, they planned to move their other applications using Oracle, to Aurora PostgreSQL

Challenges

Business Challenge:

• Overprovisioning of Licenses and costs associated with it.

• Freedom from Licensing and Vendor Lock-in Challenges.

Specific Technical Challenges:

• The end-customer had access restrictions for DMS GUI usage by Cyient & Minfy on AWS console and AWS CLI was used to solve this issue

• Converting complex Oracle SQL code objects to PostgreSQL for COTS app required significant engineering effort.

• Achieving HADR, DR, Scale-up/out with Oracle posed cost & management challenges which we resolved as a part of our solution

Technical Solutions

Features of the Solution:

• Used AWS SCT and AWS CLI with DMS for migration to AWS Aurora PostgreSQL

• Customized Ora2PG integration for SQL code object conversion

• Code conversion for schema and SQL/DB objects with open-source accelerators.

• Factored RDS Multi-AZ and Read Replicas for HADR & read scaling

• Open-source customizations for BLOB/CLOB tables and CDC using DMS.

• Designed and executed open-source PostgreSQL APMs for performance insights

• Provided SQL query optimization recommendations with Aurora PostgreSQL APM reports

About Minfy

August 31, 2023 | Resonances Type: CaseStudy

About the Company

Mjunction is an Indian online marketplace company that specializes in e-commerce, digital procurement, and supply chain solutions. Founded in 2001 as a joint venture between Tata Steel and SAIL, Mjunction has played a pivotal role in transforming various industries by providing innovative technology platforms for buying, selling, and managing commodities and services. The company's expertise lies in creating transparent, efficient, and secure digital ecosystems that optimize business processes and drive value for a wide range of stakeholders.

Customer Challenges

Mjunction faces the challenge of migrating 120 on-premises servers, comprising primarily Linux stack (63) and some Windows (57), including SAP (24) and Non-SAP (96) workloads, to AWS cloud. The objective is to centralize infrastructure for inventory consolidation, optimize costs, and enhance operational efficiency. The underlying issue lies in their on-premises infrastructure, which contributes to elevated costs.

Why Minfy

Mjunction selected Minfy as their migration partner due to a well-established relationship as their reselling partner. Leveraging Minfy's premier AWS partnership in India and a track record of successful large-scale migrations underscored their expertise and reliability.

Minfy’s Solution

Minfy successfully undertook a substantial migration initiative for Mjunction, encompassing the migration of their 120 on-premises servers. Notably, we seamlessly migrated their critical application, Auction1.metaljunction.com, from IBM infrastructure to AWS, including the associated databases. This paved the way for the following transformative elements within our comprehensive solution:

Specific Outcomes

Through Minfy's migration initiative, Mjunction achieved enhanced application performance and scalability with dynamic autoscaling, optimized costs by transitioning to open-source PostgreSQL databases, established a secure landing zone ensuring compliance, and seamlessly migrated their critical application to AWS, ensuring uninterrupted service. This modernization drive equips Mjunction for future growth while providing immediate benefits in efficiency, cost, and user experience.

About Minfy

July 28, 2023 | Resonances type: Case study

Executive Summary

Pos Malaysia is the national courier service provider and sole licensee for universal postal services in the country, delivering to more than 10 million addresses across the nation. With a track record of over 200 years, the Pos Malaysia Group has progressed from a traditional postal service into a dynamic mail and parcel services, financial services and supply chain solutions provider with the largest delivery and touchpoint network in Malaysia. Pos Malaysia’s Integrated Parcel Centre (IPC) was upgraded to process over 300,000 items a day. With the growing demand, Pos Malaysia incorporates various technologies to deliver several services to its customers and to realize its vision, “We deliver. We connect. We improve lives.”

Challenges

• IAM User best practice: POS Digital account has IAM users and wanted to improve their security posture in terms of IAM users, password policy, temporary access, secrets manager etc by implementing best practices to protect against unauthorized access across the cloud environment.
• Automation: POS Digital account wanted to have a reliable platform with a modernized environment by leveraging AWS cloud-native services with higher fault isolation.
• Reliability: POS Digital account’s objective is to enhance their testing process to validate the multi-deployment strategy along with the auto-scaling group to minimize the peak load performance.
• Higher Availability for Application Recovery: POS Digital account wants to improve its application resiliency with multi-account strategy with a disaster recovery plan.

AWS Best Practice Recommendations Implemented

Security Pillar

• Enable IAM key rotation for more than 90 days.
• Configure password policy to match organization standards.
• Implement AWS Secrets Manager in SSM parameter.
• Enable IMDSv2 to secure EC2 instances where IAM roles are enabled.

Reliability Pillar

• Enable multi-account strategy to plan for DR setup.
• Enable auto healing layer by leveraging AWS Autoscaling group for business-critical instances.
• Enable Route53 for more control over the data plane.

Performance Pillar

• Enable metrics for infra and app layer with application insights to have more control of all layers.
• Use AWS Config to have a proper audit of all the resources.

Customer Outcomes

• Improved Security: The POS Digital account has enabled security posture across the environment in terms of MFA and IAM best practice and have enabled IMDSv2 to protect all the EC2 instances.
• Enhanced Reliability: POS Digital account enabled auto-scaling group with a highly reliable environment. And customer has performed distributed load testing using Apache JMeter.
• Cost Optimization: AWS Compute Optimizer has been enabled to have more control over the rightsizing of resources and addressed RI instances for better cost optimization.
• Security Standards: End-to-end monitoring has been enabled on both the infra and app layer with application insights. Also tested some canary scripts for Synthetic monitoring on the web layer.

Conclusion

The POS Digital account has made significant enhancements across multiple fronts in its AWS environment. These include improved security through the implementation of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), adherence to IAM best practices, and the deployment of IMDSv2 to safeguard all EC2 instances. Additionally, the account has bolstered reliability by establishing an auto-scaling group for a highly dependable system, validated through distributed load testing using Apache JMeter. Cost optimization efforts have been prioritized by enabling AWS Compute Optimizer to fine-tune resource allocation and address Reserved Instances (RIs) for cost efficiency. Lastly, security standards have been elevated with end-to-end monitoring spanning both infrastructure and application layers, aided by application insights and the introduction of canary scripts for synthetic monitoring at the web layer to proactively identify and address potential issues.

About Minfy

July 28, 2023 | Resonances type: Case study

Executive Summary

AyurAI is a deeptech company that started with the goal of revolutionizing Ayurveda through evidence-based, data-driven frameworks. This case study outlines how Minfy collaborated with AyurAI to leverage AWS services and implement best practices in order to overcome their scalability, reliability, security, and cost optimization challenges. By embracing the AWS Well-Architected Framework and adhering to recommended remediation strategies, AyurAI achieved significant improvements in its security standards, enhanced reliability, and improved scalability.

Challenges

Secure Multi-Account AWS Environment
Ayur.AI needed to have a multi-account strategy to enhance their environment with
isolated access and a secure AWS environment, implementing best practices to protect
against potential threats and unauthorized access across multiple accounts.

Automation
Ayur.AI wanted to have an automated deployment strategy of their development environment by leveraging AWS cloud-native services with higher fault isolation.

Cost Optimization
Ayur.AI's objective was to enhance cost efficiency by identifying and decommissioning areas of unnecessary expenditure, thereby implementing effective budget forecasting measures.

Higher Availability for Application Recovery
Ayur.AI's goal was to improve application recovery capabilities, decrease downtime, and mitigate the potential impact of disruptions.

AWS Best Practice Recommendations Implemented

Operational Pillar

• AWS Developer tools like CI/CD pipelines such as AWS CodeBuild, AWS Code Pipeline, AWS CodeDeploy and AWS CodeStar.
• Tag all resources and group them with Resource Group and Tag Editor.
• AWS SSM OpsCenter to identify the problems and record them in problem management, attach runbooks to them and track them.
• Amazon EventBridge, wherever applicable, to receive the status of the resources created or SNS to get notified on any business-critical alerts.

Security Pillar

• Enable AWS Secrets Manager to manage secrets like database credentials and passwords.
• Implemented AWS Key Management Service.
• Implemented S3 bucket default encryption.
• Enforce Access control with the least privileges, including access to encryption keys.
• AWS Config Rules can automatically remediate noncompliant resources as part of the Landing Zone
• Configure CloudTrail for capturing User Event Behavioral Activity (UEBA)

Cost & Reliability Pillar

• Configure AWS Budget & Cost Explorer to have budgetary forecast along with notification
• Configure Blue/Green deployment for a better deployment strategy
• Apply Autoscaling groups for prod instances to have a reliable environment

Customer Outcomes

Improved Scalability: Ayur.AI achieved improved scalability by implementing AWS Landing Zone with serverless architecture empowering them to handle increased workloads and scale their infrastructure seamlessly to meet evolving business demands.
Enhanced Reliability: Ayur.Ai's applications and database are operational, employing a backup strategy that entails. A 7-day retention policy for the production system and a 3-day retention policy for the non-production system.
Cost Optimization: Ayur.AI successfully optimized costs by eliminating unnecessary expenses, right-sizing resources, and capitalizing on cost-effective AWS services, leading to significant cost savings.
Security Standards: Through the implementation of end-to-end encryption, with encryption on transit and at rest. All the authentications are with SSO with an appropriate custom policy in place.

Conclusion

Ayur.AI has realized several customer outcomes through their adoption of AWS practices: Their improved scalability, facilitated by AWS Landing Zone and serverless architecture, has enabled seamless handling of heightened workloads and infrastructure scaling. Additionally, their operational reliability is assured through well-defined backup strategies and retention policies for both production and non-production systems. The company's commitment to cost optimization has resulted in substantial savings through resource right-sizing and leveraging cost-effective AWS services. Furthermore, Ayur.AI has achieved robust security standards by implementing comprehensive encryption measures for data both at rest and in transit, along with single sign-on authentication supported by customized policies.

About Minfy

SREI Equipment Finance Ltd. has emerged as one of the major equipment financiers in India. The company enjoys a Pan-India presence with 89 branches and 4 offices, across 21 states.
SREI Equipment Finance faced the challenge of ensuring business continuity and data protection in the event of a disaster. As a leading player in the equipment finance market, SREI operated mission-critical applications and complex workloads that required meticulous planning and execution during the migration process. It was crucial for the company to minimize downtime, prevent data loss, and optimize the total cost of operations for its DR strategy.

Solution

Minfy, an AWS partner with deep expertise in cloud technology, collaborated with SREI to design and implement a phased migration approach for non-critical workloads. This allowed SREI to gradually familiarize itself with AWS cloud technology while ensuring uninterrupted business operations.
To ensure minimal downtime and prevent data loss, Minfy employed specialized tools and methodologies during the migration of complex, mission-critical applications. These tools facilitated a seamless transition to the AWS cloud environment, safeguarding data integrity and preserving the functionality of critical systems.
Minfy leveraged its proprietary intellectual property (IP) to integrate a cost-optimized file system into SREI's AWS infrastructure. This integration enabled efficient and cost-effective storage solutions for the company's DR requirements.
In addition, Minfy configured AWS Backup to facilitate cross-region snapshot replication, enhancing data protection and resilience. This approach involved creating backups in multiple regions, ensuring that critical data was replicated to remote locations, thereby mitigating potential disasters. This comprehensive DR strategy enabled SREI to detect workload impact, restore infrastructure from backups in a different region, and seamlessly perform request failover to the recovered region.

Outcomes

• Minimal Downtime and Zero Data Loss: The migration of complex, mission-critical applications was executed successfully, with minimal downtime and zero data loss. This ensured uninterrupted business operations and data integrity during the transition to the AWS cloud environment.
• Optimized Cost of Operations: By leveraging Minfy's expertise and utilizing AWS Backup for cross-region snapshot replication, SREI Equipment Finance achieved a highly cost-optimized DR solution. The total cost of operations for the DR strategy was reduced to a mere 15% of the primary data center's total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Successful DR Drill: SREI conducted a comprehensive disaster recovery drill, which validated the effectiveness of the implemented solution. The drill was carried out seamlessly, with zero data loss, further bolstering the confidence of SREI in its DR capabilities.
• Gartner Approval: The DR solution implemented by Minfy received audit approval from Gartner, a leading global research and advisory firm. The seamless execution and robustness of the solution were acknowledged, with no observations or recommendations made by Gartner.

February 19, 2022 | Resonances type: Case study

Founded by Mr. Jaidayal Dalmia in 1939, Dalmia Cements is a pioneering cement company in India. Headquartered in New Delhi, the company operates as Dalmia Cement (Bharat) Ltd, a 100% subsidiary of Dalmia Bharat Ltd.

The company has a manufacturing capacity of 35.9 million tons per annum (MTPA) across 14 plants and grinding units located in 10 states. With over 33,000 dealers and sub-dealers, the company serves more than 22 states and is a leading player in each region it is present in. The company has grown through acquisitions and greenfield expansions to scale the business and venture into new territories. Dalmia Cement is unique in that it has at least one plant in each of the four major eastern states of West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha.

The goal

Dalmia's business goal is to be in the top two in all its businesses through the strength of its people and the speed of its innovation. To achieve this goal on an innovation front, they want to centralize their IT infrastructure, modernize their applications, and reduce costs, including license costs. They also want to transform their applications and make them future-ready in order to accelerate innovation. In addition, their applications are critical and they are looking for high availability as well as disaster recovery capabilities

The problem statements

Dalmia Cement operates a business model that relies on on-premise and third party (NetMagic), data centre for storing and processing all the data generated by its various services. Our assessment identified a total of 123 servers and 11 applications hosted in these locations. The company processes a large amount of data, on SAP and non-SAP applications, which is used for invoicing, data processing, transformation, and analysis by various business units in both the headquarters and cement plants. As the business continues to grow, the company aims to migrate its data centre to the AWS cloud to increase agility and build a sustainable ecosystem. In addition, the company is facing challenges during peak periods due to heavy workloads on critical applications and poor overall performance of the current data centre. The company is seeking a secure and cost-effective solution with high availability and disaster recovery for SAP and Non-SAP data with continual running business.

Keys Drivers:

1. To find scalable, agile and high availability solutions for Dalmia Infrastructure in the long run.
2. Extension of the private cloud contract, with critical business applications and ERPs hosted on the private cloud.
3. Limitations and constraints in the technology front are hindering faster business growth and innovation in on-premise infrastructure.

Infrastructure solutions:

1. Minfy leveraged the Migration Acceleration Program to create a business case for migration to AWS.
2. We performed a well-architected review on SAP workloads and non-SAP applications.
3. We designed and deployed an SAP HANA HA-DR solution in accordance with AWS Well-Architected Recommendations and SAP standards.
4. Minfy implemented an HA solution for SAP HANA workloads in different availability zones within the Mumbai region and a disaster recovery configuration in the Singapore region to ensure optimal use of services and no data loss through data synchronization.
5. The Sugar SAP workload was directly replicated through Cloud Endure in the DR site.
6. We migrated legacy non-SAP applications through the Database Migration Service (DMS) for MySQL and MSSQL.
7. We configured AWS RDS for non-SAP databases for SDMS and PLMS-UAT, providing a hassle-free service and high availability.
8. A Transit Gateway was configured to establish a secure connection between the virtual private connection in the cloud and the on-premise database/application.
9. AWS S3 was used to store data across cement plants throughout India, as well as HANA complete and log backups.
10. COMMVAULT and AWS Backup were deployed for all EC2 backups and file backups. COMMVAULT was used to restore file-level backups, and AWS backups were used to restore EC2s.
11. Active Directory was configured for all user management access and privileges, including server connectivity through Password Manager Pro.
12. A cloud operating model was defined and implemented, and cloud operations were transitioned to a managed service support.
14. 24x7 monitoring and management of databases and infrastructure was provided through a managed service model.

Managed Services solutions

Minfy's Managed Services were instrumental in Dalmia's successful digital transformation journey, offering comprehensive support including:

1. Expert AWS infrastructure management
2. Efficient database management and monitoring for MySQL and MSSQL
3. Reliable backup monitoring and management through Commvault
4. Proactive disaster recovery management and support
5. Comprehensive operating system level support
6. Monitoring and optimization of non-SAP applications, such as Dotnet, IIS, and PHP
7. Cost optimization and capacity planning assistance.

The Results and Benefits

1. A 35% reduction in total cost of ownership by scheduling non-production environments with over 50 virtual machines and provisioning the bare minimum for production environments with over 100 virtual machines, based on the needs of the application team.
2. The flexibility provided by AWS Cloud has allowed Dalmia to scale infrastructure according to business requirements.
3. By re-platforming critical legacy application databases into managed RDS, Dalmia has seen improved performance and reduced operational overhead for activities such as monthly patching and scheduling backups.
4. By helping Dalmia adopt cloud-native services, we're able to enable them in driving innovation and supporting their digital transformation initiatives.
5. Enhanced Data Protection: By configuring an SAP HANA High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solution in multiple availability zones, Dalmia Cement significantly improved its data protection capabilities. The redundancy across different zones ensures that critical business data remains available and accessible even in the event of hardware failures or infrastructure issues.
6. Minimized Downtime: The AWS-based DR configuration implemented by Minfy drastically reduced downtime during critical business periods. In the event of an infrastructure failure or disaster in the primary Mumbai region, the disaster recovery site in the Singapore region automatically takes over, leading to minimal downtime and ensuring uninterrupted business operations.
7. Reduced Risk: The establishment of a DR configuration across different regions in AWS mitigates risks associated with regional outages or natural disasters. This approach enhances the overall business continuity plan and safeguards Dalmia Cement's IT infrastructure against potential disruptions.
8. Cost-Effectiveness: Minfy's expert implementation allowed Dalmia Cement to optimize costs by adopting AWS services such as AWS S3 for storing data backups and AWS Backup for efficient EC2 backups. This cost-effective approach ensures data resilience without incurring unnecessary expenses.
9. Reliable Data Storage: AWS S3 was employed to store data across cement plants throughout India, providing a reliable and scalable solution. This secure storage option allows easy data access and facilitates efficient data recovery during the DR process.
10. Proactive Monitoring and Management: Minfy's Managed Services offered 24x7 monitoring and management of databases and infrastructure. This proactive approach ensures prompt identification of potential issues and immediate action to maintain DR resilience.

Overall, Minfy's implementation of AWS solutions has significantly bolstered Dalmia Cement's Disaster Recovery capabilities, allowing them to maintain high availability, minimize downtime, and protect critical business data. These outcomes demonstrate Minfy's expertise and commitment to providing robust DR solutions, making them a strong candidate for the AWS Competency program in DR resilience.

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