Hybrid Cloud Solution Implementation Supports DMS Provider’s Rapid Data Center Extension to a Public Cloud
Client Background
Our client is an automotive dealer management system (DMS) provider focused on the US market.
Business Challenge
Our client ran its core platform in a traditional data center environment and also used it to host customers' environments. Due to the rapid growth of its business and customer base, our client faced scalability and capacity challenges. Our client’s new CIO, executive team, and investment group wanted to ensure the company was well-positioned for the future and understood the need to consider a move to the cloud. SoftServe was consulted to provide our client with a well-researched and cost-efficient way to address its scalability challenge and expand the platform to enable future growth.
Project Description
SoftServe worked with our client to design several possible solutions to the scalability challenge and helped to assess their match for our client’s future business strategy. The choice was between building a new data center or extending to the cloud. Each approach had pros and cons, which our team identified and evaluated in reaching a decision. On one hand, adding new hardware and finding a location for a data center would allow for continued leveraging of existing assets.
On the other hand, a hybrid cloud promised new capabilities, such as immediate scalability, improved infrastructure reliability, and a simplified way to extend business even further in future. Most importantly, a hybrid cloud solution significantly reduced TCO and improved ROI compared to the hardware only option. After evaluating these results, our client and SoftServe collectively decided to pursue the hybrid cloud option.
Immediately following, the team set up a pilot platform to validate its technical feasibility and conducted migration tests. The pilot phase proved the solution capabilities for real customers and allowed our client to assess the impact of the new architecture. It also boosted our client’s customer confidence in executing the production environment migration. Within six weeks, our team successfully scaled up the platform and migrated our client, over 100 hosted customers' environments, and hundreds of virtual machine workloads to the hybrid solution utilizing advanced methods. Post-deployment, SoftServe and our client continue to work on managing, tuning, and optimizing the performance and results of the new solution.
Value Delivered
Our client and SoftServe implemented a fully-operational hybrid platform that extends our client’s data center environment to a public cloud. The solution allows our client to manage its growing demand for hosting customer workloads in a cost-effective and efficient way, without product refactoring or talent reskilling.
This hybrid solution also brought several enhancements, including an improved disaster recovery plan, avoidance of vendor lock-ins, better security, and efficient migration of workloads between on-prem data centers and the cloud. Our client’s partnership with SoftServe and investment in a hybrid cloud solution led to a significant reduction of planned investments and support, which our client can now reinvest into other areas of the business. With this infrastructure transformation, our client is now well-positioned to expand its customer base, scale performance, and continue its rapid growth trajectory.