Linked2Pay

Problem Description:

For over a decade, Linked2pay split their infrastructure between two physical datacenters. Operating within the payments industry, they have to be PCI compliant, which meant these datacenters required substantial maintenance in order to meet PCI-DSS standards. As a result, operational costs were an ongoing concern for the company.

Solutions Highlights:

AVM undertook a comprehensive analysis of Linked2pay’s operations: studying their business priorities, costs, production loads, resource utilization, and Service Level Agreements. After considering both local and cloud based solutions, we concluded that a migration to the cloud would be hugely beneficial for Linked2pay.

This migration presented a new opportunity for the business to rebuild their system from the ground up: reducing costs, eliminating the need to maintain underutilized hardware, and easing the patching process. We decided Oracle cloud was the most economically and technically viable product for them. Working both on-site and remotely, we conducted a series of workshops to prepare for the migration, documenting everything along the way.

Using GitLab for source control, we moved Linked2Pay’s IBM legacy stacks for all environments – including development, staging, and production. To ease the process, and bring agility to the team we implemented a blue / green deployment model using Ansible and Terraform, whilst also switching their Cisco ASA firewall to FortiGate Next-Generation.

The IT culture change within Linked2pay formed a critical part of the migration. Moving away from physical infrastructure to the cloud was warmly welcomed from development and operations all the way up to C level. Linked2pay saw their costs cut in half, with system availability rising to 99.999%. Seeing such a positive impact – particularly on their IT budget – was a hugely rewarding experience!