About the Client
A leading financial group in Australia needed to transform VMware-based applications and reduce its on-premise data footprint, and fast. To this end, Sourced Group an Amdocs Company (Sourced) was engaged to build a scalable, multi-region platform for private cloud consumption using Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE). Outcomes include:
- Operational overheads reduced through consolidation of multiple private cloud environments into GCVE.
- Cost-efficiency improved via on-demand provisioning of compute, storage, and memory resources.
- Security enhanced using infrastructure- and policy-as-code to leverage key features of Google Cloud’s infrastructure.
Challenge: On-premise Private Cloud Falling Short of Requirements
The bank’s on-premise private cloud infrastructure, based on VMware applications, was unable to scale or adapt in line with business requirements. To overcome this challenge, it had committed to rehosting on Google’s virtual private cloud (VPC) environment. However, progress was slow and with data centres targeted for closure the following year, pressure was mounting. Internal teams’ unfamiliarity with the required cloud concepts was another limiting factor.
Sourced, a trusted partner for the bank having already supported other aspects of its cloud journey. We were engaged to streamline and accelerate the VPC rehost, ensuring it delivered the required capabilities and benefits, while enabling internal teams to work with confidence in the new environment.
Solution: Expert Platform Engineering Leverages Power of Google Cloud
Sourced delivered a robust private cloud platform using GCVE. The solution combines the scale and infrastructure of Google Cloud with VMware’s enterprise-grade software-defined private cloud data centre offering.
We consolidated multiple on-premise private cloud environments into GCVE and implemented layered automation using infrastructure-as-code. This reduced the operational overhead and accelerated the migration, whilst ensuring the VPC inherited foundational Google Cloud elements already in place at the bank.
Expert engineering and close collaboration with internal teams meant the platform was built according to the bank’s specific needs and financial services sector standards. For instance, we implemented VMware-level logging which is not natively integrated with Google Cloud. We also leveraged new GCVE node types and core count restrictions to aid resource optimisation. Additional technical contributions from Sourced related to data encryption, network design, privileged access management, and log forensics.
Outcome: GCVE Rehost Delivers Operational and Security Benefits
The GCVE platform build and rehost was completed well ahead of the bank’s data centre exit deadline. What’s more, using VMware’s software-defined private cloud data centre offering ensured key elements of the platform mirrored the on-premise environment. Internal teams were familiar with the look and feel, which allowed them to get up to speed quickly with minimal training.
Extensive use of as-code approaches means the platform delivers significant operational and security benefits. Simpler provisioning allows new compute, storage, and memory resources to be deployed on-demand in minutes, and the risk of security events has been reduced. Leveraging the scalable nature of GCVE facilitates better cost-efficiency too. The bank can automatically scale compute resources up and down according to fluctuating demand without having to overprovision.
