About the Client
Delio provides innovative white-label technologies that enable financial companies to reimagine the way they offer private investments. With a talented and experienced software development team, it specialises in tailored solutions to improve customer interactions and experiences.
New opportunities in Switzerland meant Delio needed to store customer data on Swiss soil, but its existing cloud vendor, Amazon Web Services (AWS), didn’t have a presence there. We were appointed to help build and run a dedicated platform hosted on Azure’s Swiss data centre.
Challenge: Data Residency Issues Pose Technical Challenge
When Delio secured a high-profile Swiss investment bank as a client, a rethink of its cloud computing model was required. While all customer information had to be held in Switzerland, Delio’s existing cloud vendor, AWS, didn’t have a data centre in the country. To overcome this issue, Delio opted to build a dedicated platform on Azure for its new customer and the broader Swiss market while retaining its AWS-hosted platform for other markets.
We were appointed to help build a new solution in Azure to support Delio’s core application. This involved providing a way to deploy services to both cloud platforms. There were also long-term technical matters to consider beyond the initial set-up and data transfer. Delio’s in-house skillset centred on AWS, meaning neither developers nor DevOps engineers had experience of Azure. This presented potential issues surrounding the compatibility of new software updates and the maintenance of reliable and secure operations.
Since we hold expertise in both AWS and Azure, we were the ideal partner to overcome these issues with a cloud platform operations service.
“We wanted an IT partner with advanced cloud engineering expertise across both AWS and Azure. [This collaboration gave us] the skills we needed to build a strong, secure and compliant presence in Switzerland.”
Farid Tejani
Chief Technology Officer, Delio
Solution: Build it, Migrate it, Run it
We replicated Delio’s AWS environment during the platform build phase, working with the Delio team to make improvements and changes where required. This included adding more automation, enabling Delio to add new Swiss customers and scale seamlessly over time.
Any cloud-to-cloud transition presents challenges related to code incompatibility between the two providers. This was a particular issue for Delio as the development team continued to write code during the setup phase.
Services in AWS and Azure may have the same purpose, but they work very differently. When it comes to storage, AWS has S3 buckets, whereas Azure has storage accounts. Authentication methods differ between platforms, too; the APIs the service needs to interact with are different, as are the configuration and parameters required to retrieve data. We ensured Delio’s developers benefited from an increased understanding of different software development kits (SDKs) and updated applications to work on each platform.
We also configured application deployments to be tagged according to the destination cloud platform. This allows different configurations (such as API endpoints, connection strings, and credentials) to be retrieved, meaning an application can reach out to the appropriate storage resources.
Outcome: Consistency and Operational Maturity
With our assistance, Delio now has a fully operational multi-home platform, enabling it to meet the demands of the Swiss private banking market seamlessly and securely. In-house developers can easily deploy to the AWS and Azure-hosted platforms, ensuring a consistent approach to ongoing innovation and improvement.
“Not only [is the team] always on-hand to offer technical guidance, but they’ve taken the time to help upskill our team with Azure’s best practices and techniques. This partnership has enabled us to access important new markets, and we’ve been able to build a fantastic working relationship with the engineers.”
Alex Le Peltier
Lead DevOps Engineer, Delio
This case study is based on work completed by DevOpsGroup before the team joined forces with Sourced Group, an Amdocs company.
