A leading US-based pharma IT company that monitors and maintains cloud-native enterprise networks needed support to run its operational systems. The client's core engineering team is responsible for designing and deploying infrastructure services and the company required help to integrate cloud-technical customers with its complex compliance model. The client also needed to retreat from its existing data centers.
Based on HCLTech's strong engineering DNA and history of collaboration, the clients chose us to manage and deliver customized IT solutions for its business customers. The client had architected the technological infrastructure internally and needed HCLTech to accelerate their progress in the cloud. We proposed to do that by provisioning a new environment that enabled end users to become cloud-compliant while providing operational support to the company's customer base.
The Challenge
Complex cloud environment and compliance issues
Due to federal regulations, the client has a very complex compliance framework. The company faced the following challenges:
- Despite the company conducting complimentary programs every quarter and engineering calls every other week for end users, the users struggled to become IT-compliant
- End users needed guidance on mandated channels of documentation to facilitate onboarding to the platform and resolving tickets
- Certain geographies didn't permit the creation of services on the self-help platform, so the company needed resources dedicated to service creation
- The company needed to establish a pay-as-you-use model for the cloud environment to stay competitive
- They needed to move the entire workload to data centers that support their servers or to the cloud
The Objectives
Scale up the infrastructure and end-user operational support
The client required LI and L2 support from AWS, Azure and Google's cloud platforms. HCLTech became the primary partner for all support activities and transformational initiatives around operations, infrastructure, network, storage, patching and cloud adoption for the client's customers. The goal was to implement and underpin all compliance-focused, platform-specific services.
The Solution
Supporting end users in the cloud and maintaining compliance guidelines
Collaborating with all stakeholders to identify problem areas, HCLTech studied the full tech stack of the client's digital environment and the challenges it posed in its service pipeline.
This analysis helped us to implement the following solutions:
- Aligned Windows and Linux end users with built-in compliance guidelines
- Proposed ideas, solutions and changes wherever required, if possible. Our operations team guided and provided resources for end users who didn't have access to specific provisions due to compliance issues
- Guided end users in following the correct documentation from the client's guidelines. We also collaborated with other vendors and the customer's internal engineering team to provide solutions to end users
- Previously, the client's cloud operations team supported more than 9,000 AWS servers and 4,000 Azure servers. HCLTech currently supports the provisioning, commissioning and operations of approximately 15,000 cloud servers. While AWS uses more laaS components (load balancers, hosted databases, containers and elastic compute clouds), Azure primarily focuses on the PaaS model and supported web applications, Databricks and PaaS databases
- Since the client has a self-service platform, the primary function of HCLTech's operations team is to uphold compliance. Because customers perform 80-85% of deployment activities through the self-service platform, the operations team resolves non-compliance issues for the remaining 15-20%
The Impact
Scale up the infrastructure and end-user operational support
By collaborating with HCLTech, the client experienced the following benefits:
- Reduced server provisioning time from one week on VMware to a few minutes in the cloud
- Offered the pay-as-you-go model to its clients for added flexibility and agility
- Helped enterprises migrate from on-premises infrastructure to an AWS-owned VPN environment
For this client, as for all enterprises, migrating to the cloud generates big business benefits that drive continuous modernization and accelerate progress. They no longer have to invest in physically hosting their data centers and can scale output according to market conditions.
With this initiative, we matured the client from a proof-of-concept state into a fully secure and scalable enterprise operation environment in the cloud. Moving from zero servers to approximately 15,000, HCLTech has driven the client's progress, supported their complex compliance environment and streamlined the process for future migrations.
