Apigate Strengthens Customer Relationships with AWS Business Support

When ApigateAXP first launched in 2014, the platform ran on premises. Charith De Silva, director of engineering at Apigate, says, “With an on-premises infrastructure, we faced problems with the time and cost of scaling resources in the data center. Plus, we constantly had to run security audits on our IT, adding to our management overheads.”

In 2018, after evaluating a number of cloud providers, the company decided to run ApigateAXP on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. De Silva explains, “By moving to the AWS Cloud, we could improve the flexibility of our IT and avoid the upfront cost of buying hardware. AWS also offered us a range of managed services to reduce our admin expenses, and AWS certifications including ISO 27001, which helped ease the burden of constant audits.”

The business runs ApigateAXP on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances while using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for customer transaction and product data. It also uses Amazon Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3) for retaining ApigateAXP logs. “By running on AWS, our operational costs for the platform fell by 50 percent due to massive savings in the number of people needed to manage our cloud infrastructure,” says De Silva. “We could scale the platform in minutes and make code drops in a couple of hours, which took days with our traditional data center setup.”

In addition to cost reductions, Apigate is reaping the benefits of AWS Business Support, which enables the team to resolve problems simply by raising support tickets. For example, when an issue with the virtual private network (VPN) of a global MNO affected the integration with the ApigateAXP platform, AWS Business Support identified the issue as the internet key exchange, which is a protocol used to set up secure, authenticated communications.

An AWS Business Support engineer demonstrated his expertise by identifying the router, firewall, and network policies that needed adjusting once the internet key exchange protocol for the VPN was changed. Crucially, the engineer could propose the correct adjustments without the MNO IT team having to break network security regulations and share device configurations with the engineer.

De Silva comments, “If we didn’t resolve the VPN problem, we faced the expense of having to build a new API platform for this particular customer. Our AWS support engineer showed a high level of commitment—joining conference calls with our team and customer any time of the day. This was the best support experience we ever had. The dedication of our AWS support engineer was unmatched.”

By working with AWS Business Support and resolving the issue with the VPN, Apigate has strengthened its relationship with the global MNO. In turn, the MNO has successfully launched its digital wallet service in India. De Silva believes the experience shows how committed Apigate is to its customers when issues occur. He comments, “We proved that we are always there to assist our customers. It gives us peace of mind that AWS Business Support is on our side in these situations and is as committed as we are to giving our customers the best service possible.”