A leading Indonesian bank, which offers digital banking services such as savings and loans and partners with organizations to provide inclusive finance solutions for underbanked communities and women entrepreneurs, sought to enhance its digital banking services by optimizing Microsoft Dynamics 365 on AWS. Partnering with HCLTech, the bank addressed data residency challenges, improved system resilience and achieved significant cost savings while ensuring compliance with local regulations and supporting its commitment to inclusive finance.
The Challenge
The bank encountered challenges in optimizing Microsoft Dynamics 365 on AWS, including data residency regulations, seamless integration with existing systems and the need for consistent access to ensure business continuity.
- Data residency and platform constraints: Indonesia lacks an Azure Cloud Centre, making the SaaS model for Microsoft Dynamics 365 infeasible in Jakarta. Due to data residency regulations prohibiting hosting the application outside the country, the client chose to build the platform on AWS to ensure data remains within Indonesia while leveraging AWS's robust infrastructure
- Integration with JumpCloud Directory as a Service: The client required seamless integration of JumpCloud Directory as a Service with their existing systems, ensuring reliable user access across platforms
- Consistent and resilient access to Microsoft Dynamics 365: Ensuring consistent and resilient access to Microsoft Dynamics 365 across both on-premises and cloud environments was crucial to maintaining business continuity during potential disruptions
The Objective
The client aimed to improve user management resiliency, ensure business continuity for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and fine-tune auto-scaling for its COTS application on AWS to enhance digital banking operations.
- Resiliency in user management: The client sought a solution that simplified and unified user management while providing resilient access to ensure secure and uninterrupted system access for employees
- Business continuity for Microsoft Dynamics 365: A key priority was ensuring that the Microsoft Dynamics 365 application remained available and secure, with built-in resiliency to mitigate potential outages or failures
- Auto-scaling for COTS application: The client needed to fine-tune auto-scaling policies for the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) application on AWS, ensuring efficient scaling to match the application's specific performance and resource demands
The Solution
HCLTech provided a comprehensive solution tailored to the client's needs, focusing on workshops, regulatory compliance, high availability and automated infrastructure management. This approach ensured a resilient and efficient implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 on AWS.
- Tailored workshops and solution assessment: Conducted workshops to understand the client’s needs, assessed Dynamics 365 features, licensing and deployment options and collaboratively refined a best-fit solution architecture
- Regulatory compliance: Recommended deploying Dynamics 365 on AWS Jakarta region to meet data residency regulations and business-critical requirements
- High availability and active-active configuration: Implemented load balancing to distribute traffic across instances and set up active-active configurations for web and app servers, ensuring continuous availability during instance or AZ failures
- Seamless failover and automated infrastructure management: Integrated failover mechanisms for SSIS and database tiers, with nfrastructure as Code (IaC) automating deployment and management for a resilient system
- Database redundancy and quick recovery: Designed SQL nodes with redundancy and automated failover for rapid recovery, minimizing downtime and maintaining data integrity
- AWS well-architected framework:
- Security: Hosted in Amazon VPC with workload segregation into web, app and DB subnets, connected securely via AWS Site-to-Site VPN
- Reliability and performance: Leveraged multi-AZ deployment with load balancing and auto-scaling for high availability and performance
- Operational excellence: Used Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP for efficient file operations, ensuring automatic failover and recovery
- Cost optimization: Recommended Microsoft SQL Server standard edition for a cost-effective solution based on feature needs
The Impact
The implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 on AWS delivered key benefits, enhancing data residency compliance, flexibility and cost efficiency while supporting the bank's commitment to secure and inclusive digital banking services.
- Data residency solutions:
- Implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM on AWS has highlighted the critical importance of addressing data residency concerns, particularly for businesses operating in regions with strict data sovereignty laws
- By hosting the CRM platform on AWS, HCLTech ensured the client that their data remained within country borders, complying with local regulations and offering peace of mind to their customers regarding data privacy and security
- Flexibility and customization with AWS:
- One of the primary learnings from the implementation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM on AWS is the benefit of flexibility and deep customization options that AWS Services offers. Unlike the more rigid Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, AWS Cloud Infrastructure allowed the client for extensive customization to meet specific business needs and regulatory requirements
- For example: Custom compliance reporting for regulatory needs enables the bank to integrate Dynamics 365 with its internal systems to automate regulation-compliant reports for banking standards and financial laws
- Cost Optimization:
- Conducted a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis comparing costs between on-premises, subscription-model and AWS deployment
- Found AWS deployment to be 36% less expensive than on-premises, while the subscription model was 18% more costly than on-prem
- AWS services used:
- Amazon EC2
- Elastic Load Balancing
- Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
- AWS Key Management Service
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
- AWS Secrets Manager
- AWS CloudFormation
