Archiva Group Gains Speed and Scales Document Processing Platform with OMNYS on AWS

Document management company Archiva Group worked with AWS Partner OMNYS to reduce the complexity of its Requiro product set of online applications. This enabled it to speed development and scale to more efficiently handle seasonal surges in customer usage, especially for those in the retail sector. The company migrated all core service application to a single cloud-based platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Using AWS, the company can easily handle existing and emerging data regulations and develop functionalities for new services. It is on track to handle 700 million document pages annually after its modernization is complete.

Italy-based Archiva Group provides an online document management platform called Requiro that enables finance, purchasing, and human resources departments to manage and process digital document flows. It primarily serves the private sector, ranging from small businesses to large enterprises. The platform offers a suite of applications for document and data management, document archiving, electronic invoicing, and business process management. It also supports SAP integration. In addition, the company offers consultancy services to manage business governance and risk compliance.

Archiva has a 30-year record of providing document management services, both in Italy and through subsidiaries in Germany and Poland. It delivers services to over 1,000 customers across 20 countries, handling 900 different document types. Since 2018, Archiva has seen an annual growth rate of 10 percent because the growing importance of electronic document workflows for businesses has increased demand for near-real-time access to information. The company has also seen significant growth in its home market after electronic invoicing became mandatory—all of which led the company to look at developing a more resilient IT setup to grow with these changing needs.

The company was running multiple platforms for its different document management services in its on-premises data center. This had become complex, because each platform used a different technology stack, requiring multiple development teams with the required skillsets to manage each one. With its services becoming ever more business critical, the company needed more flexibility in IT operations to streamline software development. Compliance with new and changing data regulations was also essential—for example, the Italian Agenzia per l'Italia Digitale (AgID) document retention rules, and the new European Union electronic identification, authentication, and trust services (eIDAS) regulation for secure electronic cross-border transactions.

Archiva also needed to scale its document processing capabilities and add compute capacity when needed, to deliver on service level agreements (SLAs) for continuity of service. For example, food and retail customers need to process more orders during busy sales periods, something that was becoming difficult to support with Archiva’s on-premises setup. To achieve these aims, the company enlisted AWS Partner OMNYS to migrate its services to the cloud. OMNYS recommended that Archiva build its new platform on AWS to optimize the company’s IT setup, use managed services, and support business continuity.

OMNYS held several planning meetings with the Archiva team to examine its requirements and suggested the company rearchitect its services and build them on a single cloud-native platform housing all of its applications. OMNYS recommended using serverless services to control costs and to build in scaling to support increases in customer processing needs. “Being able to access additional IT resources helps us and our customers,” says Samuele Fini, sales director at Archiva Group. “Running our platform on AWS means we can develop new applications more efficiently and remain competitive.”

OMNYS began by developing a central framework for the new platform based on microservices and containers to support both rapid software development and automatic scaling. Runtime environment instances can now instantly scale up to manage increases in data traffic, using AWS Lambda, which enables users to run code without thinking about servers or clusters. The ability to scale is crucial for Archiva’s customers because of the constantly changing data regulatory environment, and the need to quickly process invoices to improve cashflow and minimize tax liabilities.

The core of the platform uses several AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to run highly secure, reliable, and scalable containers; Amazon OpenSearch Service to securely unlock real-time search, monitoring, and analysis of business and operational data; and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), which provides fully managed message queuing for microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. For configuration saves, Archiva uses Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless, NoSQL, fully managed database with single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. In addition to integrating with other AWS services, Amazon DynamoDB offers Archiva scalability and flexibility around its data models. The system has been designed to effectively manage ever-rising data volumes. “Our services support essential day-to-day business functions,” says Fini. “OMNYS is working to build up to an eventual processing capacity of 700 million pages a year once modernization is complete.”

Another area that’s important to Archiva’s customers is the ability to archive documents for long periods, often beyond the required length of legal retention. The company needed to support this by offering unlimited storage. To do this cost effectively, it uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. “Delivering more customer value was Archiva’s main goal,” says Davide Pozza, chief technology officer at OMNYS. “By working closely together, we were able to create a resilient platform that met its customers’ specific business needs.”

Requiro Drive is the first service running on the new platform. Because of increased development flexibility, Archiva can now easily extend service capabilities. It uses a combination of OpenSearch with Amazon Textract to automatically extract printed text, handwriting, layout elements, and data from any document—and Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes, which provide long-term, secure, durable storage for data archiving at the lowest cost and milliseconds access.

Archiva uses multiple AWS Regions and Availability Zones in Italy to comply with the Italian AgID document retention regulation and pan-European requirements, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the incoming eIDAS regulation. In addition, using multiple control panels and with the inherent security built into AWS services, Archiva now has more control over security and can better support its customers’ IT governance requirements.

AWS supports IT governance through services such as AWS Identity and Access Management, to securely manage identities and access to AWS services and resources, and Amazon GuardDuty, to protect AWS accounts with intelligent threat detection. Using Amazon CloudWatch means Archiva can observe and monitor resources and applications on AWS, on premises, and on other clouds. AWS CloudTrail enables Archiva to track user activity and API usage on AWS and in hybrid and multicloud environments. The next step planned for OMNYS is to build in business continuity measures using VMware Cloud on AWS, the fastest, safest path for all VMware workloads.

Further into the future, the company is also looking at building new services on AWS that harness the power of big data analytics and artificial intelligence. With Archiva Group having laid the foundations for a modern cloud platform, it can now focus on delivering more value to its customers. “OMNYS quickly understood our business needs and technical challenges—and quickly really became part of our team,” says Fini. “We feel confident that we can fully support our customers’ needs now and into the future.”