From On-Premises Data Center to Cloud: Five Star's Strategic Shift to AWS Cloud Boosts Business Resilience

Headquartered in Chennai, India, Five Star Business Finance Limited (Five Star) is a leading non-banking financial services company (NBFC), providing small business and mortgage loans to eligible borrowers. To support its growing business and improve operational efficiency, Five Star needed to address the high infrastructure total cost of ownership (TCO) and reliability issues associated with its on-premises data centers. AWS Partner 1CloudHub helped Five Star migrate its data centers to Amazon Web Services (AWS), resulting in increased scalability, agility, and reliability.

Over the last four decades, Five Star has built an expansive portfolio valued at ₹103,439 Mn. Operating across India with 547 branches and 9,358 employees, the company has sanctioned approximately 409,298 loans, primarily supporting small shop owners, vendors, and SMEs. As the company continued to grow, it faced several challenges with its legacy infrastructure such as outages, primarily caused by hardware failures and a lack of resilience and support—which resulted in substantial technological challenges. These challenges made the existing on-premises model untenable due to high capital expenditures (CapEx) and a lack of transparency. It became clear that a more robust and flexible infrastructure setup was essential for Five Star to achieve its business growth and scalability objectives. 

To address these challenges, Five Star collaborated with 1CloudHub to develop a comprehensive migration plan and strategy. 1CloudHub, a digital transformation company specializing in cloud consulting and AWS service implementation, focused on addressing Five Star's challenges with its on-premises infrastructure. The migration process lasted 18 months and involved several critical components. First, a secure landing zone was established. Next, a lift-and-shift migration was performed for existing virtual machines, utilizing AWS Application Migration Service (MGN). Additionally, a disaster recovery solution was implemented for Five Star’s application stack. Finally, several new platforms were deployed in greenfield environments to support future growth and innovation.

Achieving a built-for-purpose cloud infrastructure was possible with several key AWS services. For starters, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provided the scalable compute capacity needed to host the migrated applications and services, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) was used for backup and log management, offering reliable data storage. 1CloudHub also deployed AWS Backup for automated backup and retention policies for data and system components to safeguard data integrity and availability.

For elevated security and compliance, 1CloudHub implemented Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Config, and AWS Security Hub. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) enabled network isolation and control for a more secure environment while Amazon CloudWatch was used to monitor application logs and establish alarms for key metrics. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) provides data encryption at rest and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) manages user access and permissions. Lastly, AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) provides Five Star with a robust disaster recovery solution for its application stack, giving the company greater resilience and business continuity.

“AWS DRS played a pivotal role in our successful migration of Five Star's core business application from an on-premises data center to AWS. The tool's ability to seamlessly transfer large amounts of data, approximately 45 terabytes, was instrumental in ensuring a smooth cutover process without significant disruptions,” explains Umashankar Nedunchezhian, CTO of 1CloudHub.

Since moving to AWS with the help of 1CloudHub, Five Star has experienced significant improvements that have effectively addressed its previous challenges. “Migrating to AWS has given us tremendous flexibility, scalability, transparency, and resilience in our infrastructure. We have been well supported by 1CloudHub in our journey to move to the cloud from an on-premises model. The expertise that 1CloudHub brings to the table has been invaluable in helping us establish our AWS environment and they have demonstrated excellent project management discipline and capability during the migration,” affirms Vanamali Sridharan, CTO at Five Star.

With on-demand scalability, Five Star can now scale resources up or down as needed, particularly during high-demand periods like month-end processing. This increased scalability and flexibility has allowed the NBFC to manage operational costs more effectively, avoiding unnecessary expenditures and optimizing resource usage. With a stable and reliable infrastructure now in place, Five Star is well-positioned to continue its business growth and explore new opportunities for innovation. With such a comprehensive solution in place, 1CloudHub has been a great digital transformation partner for Five Star’s team. The successful migration to AWS has provided the company with a solid foundation to support its expanding operations and meet the evolving needs of its customers across India.

Five Star Business Finance Limited, headquartered in Chennai, India, is a leading Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC) that supports over 450,000 customers, including small shop owners, vendors, and SMEs. Five Star focuses on providing accessible financial solutions to drive economic growth and development across India's diverse business landscape.