Data Center Migration for Cardlink

How did the largest Payment Network Service Provider in Greece migrated fully its Data Center to Microsoft Azure to achieve business continuity, scalability and rapid adaptation to change. 

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cardlink case
Τhe Customer

Cardlink is the largest Payment Network Service Provider in Greece, trusted by more than 250.000 businesses
across Greece.

Need

According to the Development Strategy of Cardlink, new ІТ infrastructure had to comply with the principles of scalability,
rapid changes, transparency and manageability, adequate cost of ownership, business continuity, and cybersecurity.
The project included specifically:

  • Gradual migration of the existing on-premises infrastructure (servers, virtual machines, services) to Microsoft Azure cloud through utilization of the “Lift & Shift” and Refactor approach.
  • Increase of Microsoft Azure cloud services utilization across the company’s operations.
  • Smooth migration of all servers and services of the company without downtime in production or business processes.
Solution

Uni Systems followed its proven Azure Migration methodology built on the basis of Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework and well-architected framework for Azure: 

  • Assessment: Discovery of needs and creation of the roadmap
  • Migration
  • Management 

The cloud migration project comprised of several stages that were carried out according to a detailed plan:
IaaS & PaaS architecture design & development
Uni Systems and Cardlink teams conducted a series of architectural sessions, resulting in a detailed strategy of data center migration. The teams agreed on the Cloud Architecture (IaaS and PaaS), the technical solution stack and specifications, the scheduled migration plan, and designed a testing approach.
 

Stabilization of the solutions within the IaaS infrastructure
During this stage, the project team configured Microsoft Azure infrastructure, including Identity Management, Availability, and Disaster Recovery, Backup and Monitoring Systems, Migration mechanisms, while created custom scripts to automate the Migration. After configuring all required settings, the project team conducted a test migration of selected servers and tested them according to the previously designed quality assurance approach.

Migration execution
Due to the complexity of the project, the Project Team decided to split the entire migration process into stages. Each stage included the migration of a group of servers, post-migration testing, setup, backup, and monitoring.

Post Migration Testing of migrated services
Project Team conducted post-migration testing of services (functional and performance testing) to confirm that the solutions deployed in Microsoft Azure operated correctly and met the functional requirements according to designed architecture.

Products

Microsoft Azure

Benefits
  • Migration to Microsoft Azure significantly improved reliability, security, and productivity of Cardlink systems while at the same time reduced TCO of IT infrastructure.
  • Azure will serve as the digital cloud platform that will enable the development and implementation of innovative IT services according to Cardlink’s digital transformation strategy.
  • Reduced operational support costs. Cardlink is now more flexible in terms of building virtual servers, being able to scale, and add capacity to the running instances.
  • Azure also helped to cut down the costs of upgrading obsolete equipment.
  • Azure ensures Data Security and Privacy in terms of risks related to data losses or corruption thanks to integrated replication/ backup/ clustering solutions and 99.95% availability of IT services with minimized unplanned downtimes.
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