Azure Cloud ERP Case Study

Overview

In business since 1981, the client is a leading manufacturer of Power Transformers and Gas Insulated Switchgear as per IEC, ANSI, BS and various other standards. The company’s plants, which are certified for ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001, are situated at Meerut, 60kms from National Capital of India, New Delhi. Company is focused on serving quality-conscious customers across diverse sectors: TD Utilities, Power Generation, EPC Contractors, Railways and Industry. Client wanted to migrate their existing windows based manufacturing ERP software to cloud. The goal was to increase the current market share by reaching out to small & medium sized organizations, by providing easy access to the full feature set of the existing ERP system without the need of expensive & complex in-house solution setups. The client’s primary need was to find a cost effective, scalable alternative to hosting its ERP solution at end user’s premises or at a traditional third party hosting. The security was a major concern and need was for a secure layer above the ERP software which could set the authentication for the ERP to communicate with the end users. Ampere studied these requirements and formulated a complete roadmap detailing out the development considerations and methodology for moving the existing solution to Windows Azure. Also, to introduce advance security parameters like the Two-Factor-Authentication, Azure AD Authentication. The solution was successfully deployed to Azure Cloud computing platform, also taking advantage of Microsoft SQL Azure & Blog data storage services.

Challenges

After running the Standalone ERP for more than 10 years - providing an end-to-end ERP solution but the Product was not upmarket to take to the next level. They wanted to market the product and were facing challenges to scale it.

To integrate the system in a seamless way so that the features are available on the cloud platform.
To ensure security of sensitive & confidential data.
Provide a system which is highly configurable & scalable in order to cater to the disparate needs of a heterogeneous customer base.
To ensure portability of existing critical components & modules.
To ensure interoperability with existing 3rd party systems.
To provide the license management.
To provide the account and organization management
To find a proper replacement for existing static file storage on cloud.

Solution

We developed an Azure cloud based security system for the ERP and then move the Database to the Azure cloud. The end product is hosted on the cloud. We implemented the securities with feature like Two-Factor-Authentication, Azure Active Directory Authentication, License Management, User Management and online payment Gateway.
Some of the major activities done to provide the required solution included –

Design of a detailed migration strategy to analyze various solution aspects for cloud migration like Application compatibility, external/internal dependencies, database compatibility, application logs analysis, compliance requirements, operational cost, data security etc.
Application UI was analyzed and re-engineer wherever necessary to work properly in cloud environment.
The Authentication model was updated to Azure Active Directory Access Control.

Windows services were hosted as worker roles in Azure and web services were migrated to Azure.
Integration with Azure Diagnostic services to capture application diagnostic data in a transparent manner.
Analyze and re-engineer the existing DAL layer to utilize SQL Azure database in place of on premise SQL server.
Create a separate module to handle file storage on Azure Blob in place of local file system repositories.
Perform the requisite data migration from the on premise site to the Azure storage service entities.
Various other configuration changes like session management, third part library handling etc.

Results

The product is now managed at a greater level and it has been accepted by many organizations. The product is at the next level and the goal to market the product as SAAS has been accomplished.

Increased market share due to easy adoptions and accessibility the cloud solution.
Lower IT costs, Support costs and predictable revenue for the both the client and the solution’s end users.
The client is able to provide better customer service to its end users because of the centralized nature of the new solution.
It is easy to scale-up and scale-out as available in Azure’s Pay-As-You-Go model.
Improved Data security and solution availability (SLA of 99.95% for Hosted applications on Windows Azure).

Technologies