Madurai Municipal Corporation Saves Up To 20% on Server Costs and Increases Operability by Deploying AWS

Madurai Municipal Corporation (MMC) is the civic body that administers the city of Madurai in Tamil Nadu, India. The department operations are information-sensitive and has to address public issues timely and cost-effectively through various sub-departments which used to work in silos. Any operational hindrances due to on-premise and distributed resources impacted the department functionalities. Ilios Digital with Redington Limited customized Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions to overcome the challenges and meet the specific needs related to service delivery. A unified and resilient solution designed for the customer reduced and simplified the customer's workloads significantly and saved up to 20% on the cost of server maintenance.

The MMC has several digital governance initiatives in Health, Civic Functions, and e-Governance operating in silos. As a result, poor scalability and unpredictable downtime did not allow the corporation to operate smoothly. The lack of remote maintenance support for on-premise resources also posed a significant challenge. Further, the corporation desired more computing power and feasibility for data and documents with interoperability.

Not addressing the challenges would have led to the continued under-utilization of human and revenue resources. Also, unpredictable downtime resulted in delayed resolutions, lack of coordination, and increased maintenance charges.

In addition, as a march towards next-generation Governance, Madurai Municipal Corporation is envisaging Integrated Command and Control Center (ICCC), which requires a technologically advanced and flexible infrastructure.

MMC required cost-effective multiple cloud features for data manageability, security, and enhanced operability. AWS fulfilled these requirements by deploying scalable databases to increase operability and data manageability.

Working in broader IT infrastructure needs, AWS protected the workloads from data loss and security breaches by detecting and preventing them early. At the same time, AWS catered to MMC's requirements for disaster recovery by increasing resilience, reducing downtime, and optimizing disaster recovery and backup processes with real-time reports and unified management tools. Interoperability and portability also proved crucial with IoT integration and ML engineering.

In other words, AWS allowed the Madurai Municipal Corporation to tackle the challenges seamlessly and cost-effectively and became a preferred choice for cloud migration.

For the tender put out by MMC, Ilios Digital and its consortium partners provided the most cost-efficient, compliant, highly scalable, and feasible solution while directly addressing the problem. Redington Limited’s assistance on the arrival of cost for project BOM helped Ilios Digital finalize the project bid.

The customer chose to engage with Ilios Digital as the partner had comprehensive AWS expertise and experience, which helped to fulfill the regulatory and compliance needs cost-effectively. Ilios Digital followed a top-down approach by understanding the application stack comprehensively and in a holistic manner. The strategy included dedicated teams of Infrastructure, Database, and Middleware to manage and implement the custom AWS requirements of the customers from a single source. Transparent services & solutions eliminated uncertainty at any given point, which built trust, and resulted in a fruitful collaboration.

Ilios also ensured that the payments were smooth and took care of currency conversions wherever required. In addition, the billing and rebate from Redington Limited allowed Ilios to create cost-effective and customizable solutions for one of the largest municipal corporations in India.

Focusing on the underlying technology, building in the AWS Cloud means SL can develop and deliver innovative new services at speed. The partner adopted a range of Amazon offerings, from virtual computing to managed database services and tools to aggregate and analyze data for MMC. 

Amazon CloudWatch, for example, allowed teams to monitor applications, optimize resource utilization, and provide a unified view of operational health – which is particularly important for MMC as several different databases interact at any one time.

Further, for database services partner deployed Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS for MySQL Community Edition). The solution also included Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to make the cloud computing capacity flexible and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) to provide secure, scalable block storage with fast access and response to large volumes of data.

In addition, the advanced solutions also created a competent infrastructure for Integrated Command & Control Center (ICCC) to help the civic authorities supervise various services in real time and serve the residents more effectively. 

Ilios Digital created cost-efficient solutions to meet the dynamic operational behavior of the customer through a flexible infrastructure in sync with technology acceleration.

It meant moving away from an out-the-box third-party product to an in-house solution with dedicated expertise. Describing the outcome of AWS deployment for MMC, the COO of Ilios Digital, Gokul Anantharaman mentioned that their team achieved the desired result by building an infrastructure in AWS, which is future-proof and adapts as demands and behavior evolve in the future. With AWS, MMC achieved higher security and better operability through proper resource utilization and saved up to 20% on server maintenance costs.

To maximize the achievements further, MMC and Ilios Digital will continue together for AWS operation and maintenance support and update whenever necessary.