National Skill Development Corporation’s Digital Transformation to the Cloud

Minfy helps a skill development organization achieve frictionless user experience, gaining on-demand scalability, development & testing, facilitating improved collaboration between teams and processes to deliver higher quality services faster.

The main objectives of the NSDC are to:

• Upgrade skills to international standards through significant industry involvement and develop necessary frameworks for standards, curriculum and quality assurance.
• Enhance, support and coordinate private sector initiatives for skill development through appropriate Public-Private Partnership (PPP) models; strive for significant operational and financial involvement from the private sector.
• Play the role of a “market-maker” by bringing financing, particularly in sectors where market mechanisms are ineffective or missing.

Challenges

NSDC committed to a cloud-first strategy with Amazon Web Services (AWS), taking advantage of AWS services to provide highly secure and scalable cloud-native applications and services to its customers. Minfy has bagged the deal in RFP process and started working with the NSDC in fixed contract term basis.

The client had to spend considerable time and effort in the procurement, up-gradation and maintenance of servers. In addition, the infrastructure could not effectively handle traffic fluctuations, thereby impacting business negatively.

Being a Government Sector Organization governed by various regulatory compliance’s, security to be considered a topmost priority. Over time, while the hardware fresh cycle that is moving to the cloud would be a more scalable, reliable, secure, and cost-effective solution. The ability to instantly replicate the complete environment, launch new servers for experimentation when needed, managed services like databases, load-balancer, etc. were additional characteristics required for reducing administrative efforts and thereby increasing the team’s productivity.

Cloud-based ‘pay as you go’ approach was the ideal solution for this customer. The cloud solution that was recommended by Minfy was to use the Amazon cloud infrastructure. In addition to cost savings, the reliability of the AWS public cloud was of significant benefit to the customer.

Our Approach

More than needed to be migrated immediately for a number of intended outcomes, including frictionless user experience across all levels of interactions, gaining on-demand scalability during seasonal traffic spikes, development and testing, facilitating better collaboration between teams and processes to deliver higher quality services faster. Efficient roll out of required business opportunities, maintaining operational resilience and continuity of data was an urgent priority.

It needed detailed research and insightful understanding at every level for flawless execution. Minfy’s cloud readiness assessment provided the client with a structured, detailed analysis of the workload to help them gather strategic insights on the upcoming cloud adoption journey. It included anticipating details such as projected cost, risks involved, intended processes, potential migration paths and post-migration advantages.

Findings

As a large migration project, moving multiple applications and platforms needed an expertly phased migration strategy to ensure consistency of application deployments, on-time vulnerability assessment and security testing. Depending on the nature of some applications and requirements involved, a lift and shift or rehost strategy was suggested to avail simple, fast and efficient deployment with minimal disruption to applications workflow. In some instances, re-platforming was needed to enable better scaling and leveraging a variety of cloud capabilities.

Results

The cloud solutions ensured multiple system enhancements, lowered IT costs, and scaled application while enabling the client to effectively address varied tax processes and meet compliance requirements.  With the help of Autoscaling and Application Load balancers, we have architected the solution to scale without any hard limits. The entire solution was deployed within pressing timelines despite go to live dates were revised.

The smooth and strategic migration to the AWS Cloud made the needed architecture, process and systems available for the client to steadily meet the dynamic business needs in an evolving market. It ensures that the client’s IT team has the required flexibility and governance to rapidly provision business applications while mitigating risks and ensuring business continuity.

Reduced dependency on outdated servers increased reliability, the client’s infrastructure has become more flexible to scale up or down as demand varies or new services require. The client saw Reduced infrastructure cost through containerization and a massive 62% increase in economies of scale after moving to the AWS cloud. The migration helped the client experience stronger operational efficiency.

Minfy has also performed major optimizations for NSDC through scheduling and right-sizing throughout their journey as MSP. The billing was reduced up to 40% through these various exercises and allowed NSDC to position itself to be more innovative through modernization. 

Customer Obsession is and will always be our priority!