Background

The customer was experiencing an increase in the number of applicants, so they decided to upgrade from their legacy platform to Microsoft Azure. The customer required our expertise in seamlessly integrating the new environment with their existing legacy services to provide better security, higher scalability and a customizable environment.

Challenges

The customer encountered several challenges while upgrading to the new Azure environment like migration of sensitive data, integration and deployment issues, handling of security and performance issues and setting up monitoring solutions for proactive resolutions.

Integration Issues: The primary challenge was to perform a seamless integration between the existing solution and Microsoft Azure, ensuring uninterrupted services to users during integration, consistent user-experience post integration, compatibility between existing and new protocols and enable scalable performance.

Adopting Serverless Approach: The requirements were to use Azure PaaS as it provided serverless operations which could help in eliminating server maintenance tasks from resources, scale resources based on requirements, accelerate deployment and provide seamless integration with other Azure services.

Streamlined Deployment: While upgrading to the Azure environment, the customer wanted to ensure faster and seamless deployment processes to meet the dynamic business requirements.

Data Migration: Data migration was challenging as data transfer from the legacy ERP to the Azure SQL database required accuracy, efficiency and security to avoid disruptions in the workflow.

Credential Security: The customer wanted the new Azure environment to ensure high data security for sensitive and confidential data like credentials, access keys to avoid security breaches.

SAL and RVT SOAP Integration: The customer wanted to have a seamless integration of Azure with its highly dependable legacy protocols SAL and RVT SOAP.

Performance Demands: The customer wanted to ensure that the new Azure environment consists of features addressing custom and specific user- requirements while maintaining high availability.

Monitoring and Insights: The customer required robust monitoring tools for proactively identifying and resolving issues.

Solution

We implemented the following solutions to address the above challenges.

Front-End and API Hosting for seamless integration: We leveraged Azure Blob Storage to host the front-end data as it provides cost-effective, highly scalable, and reliable hosting for data like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We deployed the backend APIs on Azure Web Apps as it allows seamless integration with other Azure services

Legacy Database Migration to Azure SQL Database: We leveraged Azure SQL Database as it offers better manageability, scalability and provides high availability.

Leveraged Azure API Management: We leveraged Azure API Management as it ensures authentication, authorization and secure communication through built-in features like throttling and IP whitelisting.

Subscription keys and Client Certificates: We utilized subscription keys and client certificates for enhanced security. The subscription keys were leveraged to have access control over API’s and the client certification served as an extra layer of security for authenticating clients accessing the API.

Multi-stage CI/CD pipelines: We utilized multi-stage CI/CD pipelines using GitHub and Azure DevOps which automated the development process, provided minimal errors and accelerated the deployment cycles

Azure Function Apps for Serverless Efficiency: As Azure Function is a serverless computing model, we used it to handle periodic tasks like CRON triggers. This eliminated the need to have dedicated servers.

Robust Monitoring: We integrated Application Insights to provide real-time performance tracking and actionable insights through intuitive dashboards.

Secure Network Architecture: We leveraged VNET to provide a restricted access and isolated environment for hosting Azure resources.

Benefits

Effortless Integration: The new system worked seamlessly with legacy SOAP services, ensuring continuity for end users.

Scalable and Flexible Features: Features like Azure Functions and Azure WebApps provide automatic scaling features which enable the systems to perform optimally during peak usage.

Faster Deployments: Implementing the CI/CD pipelines using GitHub and Azure DevOps streamlined the deployments resulting in improved efficiency and reduced errors.

Data Security: We leveraged Azure Key Vault to securely encrypt sensitive information, including connection strings and API keys, ensuring they remain protected against unauthorized access.

Smooth Data Transition: We executed seamless data transfer from Legacy system to Azure using Azure Data Factory with zero disruptions. It helped improve efficiency as Azure data factory provides codeless workflows.

Proactive Monitoring: We leveraged Application Insights to deliver real-time insights which enabled identifying the bottlenecks proactively. The real-time insights helped in optimizing the performance and reduce downtime.

Cost Savings: Serverless computing and managed services reduced operational costs without compromising reliability.