Case Study: Lift & Shift, Cornerstone Insurance Plc

Customer

Cornerstone Insurance Plc Lagos. Nigeria

Industry

Financial Services

Needs Expressed

Lift and Shift
High-Availability
Storage Expansion
Secure Cloud Infrastructure
VPN
Backup and Disaster Recovery

Benefits Realized

High-Availability
Scalable Infrastructure (Storage and Compute)
Seamless and secure communication between Azure Infra, HQ and Branch Offices
Guaranteed Backup and disaster recovery.

Background

Cornerstone is one of the leading Insurance company committed to provide on-demand Insurance services to its client across the nation. Cornerstone believes in technology as a business driver, has invested in it and will continually invest in technology. Cornerstone has its branches spread across Nigeria, the HQ and branches are connected via VPN, Cornerstone leverages offie365 as a productivity platform, and Azure as for datacenter modernization.

Problem

Cornerstone had its Line of business application servers hosted on-premises, where users connect over the web and desktop application. When they are out of office, they connect over SSL VPN. The servers were hosted on Hyper-V VMs and physical servers, while storage was provisioned from a NIMBLE Storage Server. The total consumed storage on Nimble was 8 TB. However, the applications were not highly available, storage expansion, backup and DR were issues cornerstone was experiencing. These were the reasons for migrating to the cloud.

Objective

Azure Site Recovery, Process server, Landing zone (Resource groups, Virtual Network, Virtual Network Gateway for IPsec VPN, NSG) Managed Disks, Azure Virtual Machine, Availability sets, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, Point-to-Site VPN, RBAC for adequate governance. The applications are reachable to users anytime anywhere through a secure channel, either within the office or outside

Solution

Azure Site Recovery, Process server, Landing zone (Resource groups, Virtual Network, Virtual Network Gateway for IPsec VPN, NSG, DDoS) Managed Disks, Azure Virtual Machine, Availability sets, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, Point-to-Site VPN, RBAC for adequate governance. The applications are reachable to users anytime anywhere through a secure channel, either within the office or outside

Azure has transformed the way cornerstone services its customers, because its line of business applications are highly available. This has reduced the total cost of ownership and increase its ROI.

Ahmed Onitiju- Team Lead, Infrastructure

Implementation

Assessment of the servers were done pre-migration, Azure site recovery was leveraged for the migration through a process server. The Landing zone was zone (Resource groups, Virtual Network, Virtual Network Gateway for IPsec VPN, NSG) extension of connectivity to on-premises via IPsec VPN and Point-to- site. Test-Failover was done to validate data synchronization and functionality, after which Failover was configured. Redirection of users to Azure VM was configured and on premise server was shutdown. Both teams (Reliance and Cornerstone) worked together to deliver on the project within time slice and handover training was conducted.

Solution in Action

The Server is Accessible from anywhere, connectivity of remote users and web users to the Line of business application. Protecting from all forms of attack. Remote desktop can be accessed over private IP addresses due to the VPN created. RBAC was configured for adequate access.

Cornerstone Insurance