Case Study: Lift & Shift, Central Bank of Nigeria

Background

As a regulator and governing body at the forefront of financial services sector in Nigeria, Central Bank has invested heavily in technology, both on-premises and the cloud. CBN is headquartered in Abuja with a branch in Lagos, the HQ and branch are connected via VPN, leverages checkpoint firewalls on-premises, offie365 as a productivity platform, and Azure for datacenter modernization.

Problem

Central Bank had a number servers hosted on Peer1, these servers services 3 different arms of CBN’s businesses. users connect over the web.. The servers were hosted on VMware VMs and physical servers, while storage was provisioned from a SAN. However, the maintenance cost was high, security was a concern, backup and DR were part of the experienced issues that triggered migration to Azure.

Objective
The objective was to migrate servers from Peer1 cloud services, for consolidation of its workloads on Azure, make its Line of business applications highly-available, enjoy the compute and storage scale , as well as business and disaster recovery
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
Implementation
Assessment of the servers were done pre-migration, Azure site recovery was leveraged for the migration through a process server installed on an existing server due to inaccessibility to the VMware host. The Landing zone was created (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.

We have now consolidated our Cloud Infrastructure, and Azure makes life easier, due to the ease of use, scalability, cost and ROI

Chime Okuchukwu- Manager, IT Operations
Customer
Central Bank of Nigeria, Abuja Nigeria
Industry
Financial Services
Needs Expressed
  • Lift and Shift
  • High-Availability
  • Scalability
  • 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.
  • Governance
  • Reduced cost
Background

As a regulator and governing body at the forefront of financial services sector in Nigeria, Central Bank has invested heavily in technology, both on-premises and the cloud. CBN is headquartered in Abuja with a branch in Lagos, the HQ and branch are connected via VPN, leverages checkpoint firewalls on-premises, offie365 as a productivity platform, and Azure for datacenter modernization.

Problem

Central Bank had a number servers hosted on Peer1, these servers services 3 different arms of CBN’s businesses. users connect over the web.. The servers were hosted on VMware VMs and physical servers, while storage was provisioned from a SAN. However, the maintenance cost was high, security was a concern, backup and DR were part of the experienced issues that triggered migration to Azure.

Objective
The objective was to migrate servers from Peer1 cloud services, for consolidation of its workloads on Azure, make its Line of business applications highly-available, enjoy the compute and storage scale , as well as business and disaster recovery
Solution

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