Kickstarting a leading global payments provider’s Cloud journey.
As part of a rapid Cloud redeployment, Mantalus’ customer reduces its hardware and infrastructure footprint while unlocking ongoing cost savings.
Overview
Mantalus has an ongoing partnership with a leading global payment solutions provider, which caters to a broad spectrum of clients ranging from small businesses to retail chains and international financial institutions. Their commitment to all customers is consistent: to deliver simple and dependable payment systems. Operating in around 40 countries worldwide, it is a global frontrunner in point-of-sales services, with 40 million terminals deployed, conducting millions of transactions every minute.
In Australia, they are a major innovator in the payment solutions space, providing tens of thousands of terminals to clients ranging from supermarkets to service stations. They are also a trusted partner of some of Australia’s leading financial institutions, with most Australians using one of their terminals or payment solutions in any month.
Risk Reduction
Reduced exposure to non-redundant architecture and improved platform resiliency.
Speed to Market
Improved product innovation and development.
Costs
Significantly reduced hardware and operating costs.
Background
The company had made a significant investment in its data centres but recognised the need to begin its Cloud journey. Initially, the partnership started with joint discovery workshops and recommendations from Mantalus for a Future Cloud State. The organisation’s legacy documentation was identified as requiring remediation.
Mantalus identified a further opportunity to align the customer’s future state technology strategy with a move to SaaS or the Public Cloud and the ability to leverage the modern technologies and services available with this state.
Kicking the process off with a re-platforming of their Terminal Management System (TMS) in the Quality Assurance (QA) environment, the business then commissioned Mantalus to spin up and undertake the production environment migration.
This revealed an opportunity for the firm to reduce its hardware and infrastructure footprint, providing a delta difference of ongoing cost savings as these technical requirements and refresh costs were made redundant. Mantalus also analysed its risk profile to reduce exposure to non-redundant architecture and to improve platform resiliency.
Finally, as a market-leading payment solutions provider that needs to constantly anticipate trends in purchasing and transacting, the AWS infrastructure would offer the opportunity to speed up product innovation and development while maintaining a rapid speed to market.
Challenge
The customer’s vast client portfolio, which had at times been sourced from third parties through acquisition, saw knowledge gaps identified in their DC architecture support infrastructure, which Mantalus’ highly experienced team were able to address in their Cloud Migration solution.
A solution was required that could be built and deployed with minimal interruption to the BAU application development workstream, as well as find efficiencies and demonstrate ongoing financial advantages. Some initial solution challenges included the inconsistency of the TMS platform with various dependencies such as the operating system, PHP code, and Apache data, as well as the approaching grandfathering of their existing ISP services, which would require assistance to migrate to new network services.
In addition, Mantalus worked with the customer to address pain points with their existing data centre setup that could be resolved as part of the Cloud Migration. These included offering scalability and automation, which was currently limited, the ability to use different instances (e.g. reserve instance, cost-saving plan) to control costs, removing the burden upon existing resources to manage hardware, and eliminating hardware refresh costs.
Solution
Mantalus developed a DC exit to Cloud solution that navigated the existing hardware and network challenges to kick off the organisation’s journey from a Cloud Zero state to a Native. Mantalus helped improve the design of the current architecture, improve its security posture and deliver a redesigned Cloud First network architecture. A key element of delivering the solution was working with the customer’s Internet Service Providers to connect their customers to their infrastructure.
As an AWS infrastructure greenfields client, Mantalus was onboarded with the company’s change management process, working concurrently with its customers and internal resources to create optimal migration planning.
Mantalus built a custom Landing Zone from scratch with built-in monitoring and alerting, in addition to providing Managed Services support. The Mantalus solution also provided for:
- cloud-native services whenever possible (e.g. AWS RDS Database – a fully managed DB)
- Improved Security by implementing Web Application Firewall, encryption at rest and in transit, AD integration, patching, centralised Network inspection
Innovation
Mantalus’ AWS Cloud Migration solution successfully migrated the organisation’s data centre infrastructure to the Cloud and built-in remediation strategies to resolve network vulnerability issues. A unique element of the Mantalus AWS infrastructure solution was centralised network inspection for north-south and east-west traffic, designed to provide further load balancing.
Key Solution Elements
Mantalus’ custom AWS infrastructure solution
- Auto-scaling for improved elasticity/scalability
- Cloud Native Environments with resources up-skilled in successful platform management
- Multiple Environments introduced (Dev/Pre-Prod/Prod) to implement a vastly improved change management process
- HA & Disaster Recovery now built in to the AWS application
- Significant Cost Savings with a pay as you need model that allows right sizing of requirements.
Outcomes
Mantalus’ solution delivered best-in-class AWS infrastructure for this customer’s unique data needs while enabling rapid deployment to the Cloud from their legacy state. Unlocking significant cost savings while accelerating their journey to a Cloud-native state, embedding ourselves in the client’s change management process delivered an optimal customer-focused outcome.
Ongoing Managed Services and Operational Oversight
Mantalus Managed Services (MMS) is our class-leading, bespoke cloud managed service capability, based on five key operational pillars; Security, Availability, Efficiency, Resiliency and Compliance. For various reasons, Mantalus customers choose to implement a level of ongoing assistance and oversight from the Mantalus team, to ensure critical platforms and environments are well protected with appropriate monitoring, alerting and SLAs.
In this instance, after a post-project period of hypercare, the customer elected to engage our MMS service for an ongoing annual support and managed services contract, so supplement their incumbent team, as they continue to upskill and enhance internal capability and shift more DevOps practices in-house over time.
Why Mantalus?
Mantalus’ capability is built on being the tip of the spear to solve difficult and unique problems with AWS technology. Our strength is based on having consultants with an array of industry experience, who have themselves faced a litany of complex, business critical, technology roadblocks; and found creative and class-leading ways to solve them.
We’re great at developing AWS centric architectures, where none have existed before. Think platforms or middleware that have never been attempted on AWS by anyone; or even completely AWS native solutions, removing the need for expensive 3rd party solutions.
So, where can we be useful and important to you? Anywhere there’s pain.
When you’re scratching your heads with a tricky use case that doesn’t fit neatly into a known solution or reference architecture…. think Mantalus. We’re the cure!
AWS has a fantastic array of services – and if you partner with Mantalus we can use them to help you solve just about anything.
Mantalus Partner Organisations
Mantalus provides a diverse range of solutions to deliver AWS cloud-based modernization for any business. Our Mantalus partner organisations enable us to implement solutions that meet the unique and complex needs of our clients, no matter the challenges present.