Orix Auto Infrastructure Services Migrates to AWS to Enhance Security and Boost Uptime
Transport Solutions for Companies in India
For companies looking to rent or lease automobiles in India,
Orix Auto Infrastructure Services (OAIS) provides a range of transport solutions as well as leasing options through Orix Leasing and Financial Services (OLFS). OAIS is a subsidiary of Orix Corporation in Japan.
The company has been steadily growing and expanding into new verticals since its inception in 1995. But with growth, inevitably comes change. After more than two decades operating in a data center, OAIS began migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in mid-2020. Its goals included improved performance and scalability in a modern cloud operating environment.
By migrating to AWS, OAIS has transitioned to a pay-per-use costing model and can efficiently scale its operation according to fluctuating demand. It benefits from robust disaster recovery (DR) on the AWS Cloud across all four of its business units and has dramatically improved security and risk management with segregated production, testing, and log environments.
“The issues we had with our 23-year-old data center—such as servers hanging, system lags, and network downtime—are all behind us since migrating to AWS.”
Harvinder Gandhi
Group CIO, Orix Auto Infrastructure Services
Achieves High Availability to Support Business Growth
To assist with the migration, OAIS contacted AWS partner,
Umbrella Infocare. “Umbrella Infocare deployed the right team from the beginning to help us meet desired outcomes. They helped train our teams during the migration and continue to advise us on AWS services to support our business growth,” says Harvinder Gandhi, group chief information officer at OAIS.
OAIS and the Umbrella Infocare team used
CloudEndure Disaster Recovery to migrate data to the AWS Cloud and set up
Multi-Availability Zone architecture on AWS to ensure fault-tolerant applications. As a result, the business now experiences reduced system downtime. Although service level agreements vary by customer, OAIS consistently maintains at least 99 percent uptime across applications. Gandhi says, “The issues we had with our 23-year-old data center—such as servers hanging, system lags, and network downtime—are all behind us since migrating to AWS.”
Improves Security Baseline with Segregated Accounts
One of the reasons OAIS selected AWS is the depth of security and governance tools on the platform. “We could never have deployed this multi-account, multi-layered secure environment in our on-premises data center,” says Gandhi. “AWS provided the services we needed, plus the support and execution controls to accelerate the migration process.”
Together with Umbrella Infocare, OAIS first set up an AWS Landing Zone to segregate AWS accounts for its four business units. Configuration of complex, multi-account architecture in the cloud can be a time-consuming task, but using
AWS Landing Zone quickly provided a highly secure baseline to run scalable workloads on AWS.
OAIS deployed five
Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPC) for its production, testing, shared services, security, and log environments. It has separate teams working on production and non-production VPCs in each environment with well-defined access controls. The company also takes advantage of
AWS WAF – Web Application Firewall as an additional security layer protecting each environment from external threats. A limited number of people now have access to OAIS’s production environment. Previously, the company had one network with open access for all support teams.
Outsourcing Monitoring and Reducing Manual Tasks
Segregation of accounts and rigorous access controls on AWS have also facilitated the outsourcing of log review to a third party. Logs are transferred from OAIS’s production servers to a separate server, where they are monitored 24/7 by an external partner. “We have peace of mind knowing that none of our partners have access to our critical servers. Our production environment is highly secure on AWS,” Gandhi explains.
To bolster security, OAIS relies on
Amazon Inspector, which automatically assesses applications for vulnerabilities. The business estimates its teams are now spending 45–50 percent less time on manual tasks such as security monitoring thanks to increased automation on the AWS Cloud. Engineers are instead focused on developing new applications in response to changing market conditions, particularly after business travel patterns shifted drastically in 2020.
Fully Operational Disaster Recovery Site in Six Months
As OAIS expanded its customer and asset base, it became subject to new regulatory requirements from the financial authority in India. The requirements stipulate that businesses holding more than 500 crores of Rupees (US$6.7 million) in assets must have a separate disaster recovery (DR) environment.
If OAIS had continued with its previous data-center approach, building and managing a secondary DR site in India would have entailed a huge CapEx investment. “With our previous CapEx model, it would have taken three to five years and millions of dollars to build up a DR infrastructure on premises. By using AWS, we built a fully operational DR site in the AWS Cloud within six months,” says Gandhi. After several rounds of testing and adjusting infrastructure settings, OAIS achieved its target recovery time objective (RTO) of 30 minutes or less.
Post-migration, the business continues to evaluate application performance and security controls. Umbrella Infocare and OAIS have monthly governance meetings to review AWS utilization. These reports include recommendations for cost optimization, often through granular right-sizing of instances to match each workload. In a recent example, OAIS was able to cut costs by switching to AMD processors, per a recommendation in the monthly report.
Serving 1,000 Customers with a Self-Service Portal
The future is bright for OAIS, and management is pleased with how the AWS Cloud journey continues to support business growth. In September 2021, the business launched a comprehensive, self-service leasing portal with more than 30 integrated application programming interfaces. Scalability and an elastic infrastructure are key for this new online platform, which will serve at least 1,000 corporate customers, vendors, and dealers, with tailored options for each automobile leased through OAIS.
Gandhi concludes, “Things have improved drastically for us since moving to AWS. The performance, uptime, and commitment of our partners have allowed us to move ahead with exciting new initiatives.”
Learn More
To learn more, visit https://aws.amazon.com/security/.
About Orix Auto Infrastructure Services
Orix Auto Infrastructure Services, a subsidiary of Orix Japan, offers a range of automobile rental and leasing services as well as B2B transport solutions to companies in India.
Benefits
- Migrates from data center and builds new DR site in 6 months
- Achieves recovery time objective of 30 minutes
- Restricts access to production environment
- Spends 45–50% less time on manual tasks
- Securely outsources 24/7 monitoring of logs
- Maintains uptime of at least 99%
AWS Services Used
CloudEndure Disaster Recovery
CloudEndure Disaster Recovery minimizes downtime and data loss by providing fast, reliable recovery of physical, virtual, and cloud-based servers into AWS.
AWS Landing Zone
AWS Landing Zone is a solution that helps customers more quickly set up a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on AWS best practices.
AWS WAF – Web Application Firewall
AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits and bots that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.
Amazon Inspector
Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS.
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