Transforming Cloud Operations, Security, and Cost Optimization on AWS with iCOPS from Tech Mahindra

By Harish Sidenur, Delivery Head, Cloud Native Engineering and Practice Leader, AWS CSU – Tech Mahindra
By Ramandeep Kalear, Solution Architect, AWS CSU – Tech Mahindra
By Ravi Raj H, Principal Solution Architect, AWS CSU – Tech Mahindra
By Nitin Chahar, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS

Tech Mahindra

In the ever-shifting terrain of today’s digital world, enterprises are embracing the cloud and recognizing its potent attributes such as scalability and high availability. As organizations increasingly prioritize cloud migration as a key component of their digital transformation strategy, efficient management of the cloud environment becomes crucial.

This dynamic shift towards cloud adoption represents not merely a trend but a strategic imperative, fueling the engines of innovation and competitiveness. The cloud’s inherent capacity to scale resources up or down on demand empowers businesses to respond swiftly to market dynamics.

Concurrently, cloud’s strong emphasis on high availability ensures mission-critical applications remain resilient and accessible, even in the face of unexpected disruptions.

In this post, we will delve into Tech Mahindra’s iCOPS (Intelligent Cloud Operations and Subscription Management Services), a comprehensive platform designed to streamline cloud operations, enhance security, and cost optimization on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

We’ll explore how iCOPS automates key tasks like infrastructure provisioning, code deployment, and system management; enhances monitoring capabilities to provide real-time insights into cloud infrastructure; and empowers businesses to maximize their AWS investments while ensuring robust governance and security.

Tech Mahindra is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Service Provider (MSP) that specializes in digital transformation, consulting, and business re-engineering solutions.

Solution Overview

Tech Mahindra’s iCOPS framework is a comprehensive solution designed to address the challenges associated with managing cloud operations and subscription management.

Figure 1 – Tech Mahindra’s iCOPS architecture.

The iCOPS architecture includes:

1. Provisioning: iCOPS streamlines resource allocation and deployment through automated provisioning, leveraging AWS CloudFormation and AWS Service Catalog. This ensures infrastructure setup is standardized, efficient, and tailored to specific business needs, reducing manual effort and time-to-market.
2. Automation: With robust automation capabilities, iCOPS automates repetitive tasks, configuration management, and deployment processes using tools like AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS Lambda. This results in increased efficiency, reliability, and consistency, enabling faster innovation and reducing human error.
3. Runbook/Automation: iCOPS enables organizations to automate operational tasks, enhance system management. and drive intelligent decision making to improve overall operational efficiency and agility using AWS Systems Manager, AWS Lambda, and Amazon SageMaker.
4. Security: iCOPS ensures robust security posture by integrating AWS services like AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS WAF. It monitors for threats, enforces security policies, and detects anomalies, providing proactive threat detection and mitigation to safeguard critical assets and data.
5. Monitoring: iCOPS employs Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Config, and AWS CloudTrail for centralized monitoring, configuration tracking, and auditing. It offers real-time visibility into the health, performance, and compliance of cloud resources, enabling proactive response to events, optimizing resource utilization, and ensuring operational excellence.
6. Reporting: iCOPS uses AWS Glue to get the data ready, Amazon Athena for processing data with simple queries, Amazon QuickSight to create user-friendly interactive dashboards, and Amazon Forecast to predict future trends. This helps turn the data into clear, visual insights so you can make informed decisions and creates reports without needing a data scientist.

The iCOPS platform focuses on four key areas:

• TechOps: Automating daily tasks and deployments is crucial for minimizing downtime and resolving issues proactively. This streamlined approach allows IT teams to concentrate on strategic initiatives and innovation, driving business growth and agility.
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  iCOPS provides a consistent and automated approach to handle operational procedures by creating runbooks that reduce manual intervention and ensure repeatability. This results in streamlined system and app management, event-driven automation, and intelligent decision making. It enhances operational tasks and fosters intelligent actions, thus improving overall operational efficiency.
• SecOps: Managing operations security through hardening, backup, monitoring, operations, and cloud platform governance to ensure zero vulnerability helps enhance data protection and compliance. iCOPS uses AWS-native services to achieve the goal of comprehensive governance in addition to robust security, regulatory compliance, and better visibility and financial control of the AWS environment.
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  iCOPS ensures compliance through a well-structured, multi-account environment; centralizes resource management and billing for efficient cost control; swiftly detects and responds to security threats to comply with industry regulations; proactively identify vulnerabilities to enhance security; secure web applications against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and common web exploits, ensuring data safety and compliance; gives visibility on where the money is spent, budget limits and proactive alerts upon nearing to the budgets, cost-saving strategies for optimal cost spend.
• DevOps: Enables zero manual interventions by seamlessly integrating DevOps practices. By automating the deployment pipeline and CI/CD processes, organizations can achieve faster time-to-market, increased collaboration between teams, and improved overall efficiency.
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  With iCOPS:

• • • Non-DevOps provisioning uses AWS CloudFormation for automated infrastructure setup, reducing manual intervention. AWS Service Catalog ensures standardized IT service management, promoting consistency.
    • DevOps provisioning automation makes software development and releases easier with AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodePipeline. It helps in building, code management, deployment, and CI/CD, thus ensuring quicker and reliable software delivery
• FinOps: Emphasizes continuous cost management and metrics-driven cost optimization, providing real-time cost comparison, chargeback, and cost optimization for hosting services on AWS. This helps organizations to maximize their AWS investments while ensuring financial transparency and control.

iCOPS enables clients to gain visibility into costs, as well as optimize their expenses without compromising availability, performance, and flexibility of mission critical applications on cloud.

Customer Success Stories

Some quantifiable results achieved for different customers include:

• iCOPS helped a leading U.S. educational solution company reduce operational costs by 30% through automation and achieve cost optimization, saving $20,000 annually.
• iCOPS facilitated a new generation telco company to achieve 25% cost reduction through rearchitecting to microservices, saving $15,000 monthly in hosting costs, and enhancing efficiency by 30% with a fast and secure DevOps pipeline.
• iCOPS enabled a financial services business to achieve 20% cost savings through data residency compliance, as well as 15% reduction in operational costs through automation and 25% improvement in productivity with standard monitoring and alerting policies.
• iCOPS facilitated a leading provider of jet and turboprop engines to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by 35% through AWS cloud migration, achieving 99.9% uptime and 40% increase in operational efficiency. This helped the client save $30,000 annually through infrastructure automation, and enhance productivity by 30% through streamlined operations and monitoring.

Conclusion

iCOPS (Intelligent Cloud Operations and Subscription Management Services) by Tech Mahindra is a powerful solution tailored to the specific demands of today’s digital landscape. By providing a unified view across cloud-native, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, iCOPS drives efficiency and fosters innovation to empower organizations to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving technology landscape.

iCOPS harnesses the power of the cloud to enable organizations on a journey towards operational efficiency within the AWS environment. To gain insights into real-world scenarios and delve deeper into the multiple ways customers are leveraging iCOPS to accomplish their business objectives, explore Tech Mahindra’s customer case studies.

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Tech Mahindra – AWS Partner Spotlight

Tech Mahindra is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that specializes in digital transformation, consulting, and business re-engineering solutions.

Contact Tech Mahindra | Partner Overview | AWS Marketplace