“The market never sleeps, and neither can our platform. That’s why we chose ICT Solutions & Microsoft Azure.”
ICT Solutions is proud to enable their ongoing success with a strategic partnership to maximize their use of the technology to support their team.
A business transformation journey
The client
Calamatta Cuschieri is one of Malta’s largest financial services firms that pioneered the local industry as early as 1972. Today the company offers a wide range of services across a variety of financial assets, these include Independent Investment Advice, Live Online Trading, Fund Services, Investment Management Services & Discretionary Portfolio Services amongst others.
With a mission to bring constant innovation to the financial services industry, and in the utilisation of the latest technologies to achieve our mission, Azure was a natural fit for the Calamatta Cuschieri technology journey.
What Calamatta Cuschieri wanted to achieve
When embarking on a cloud journey, it is critical to choose the right cloud partner. While Azure is easy to dip a toe into, choosing the right partner to guarantee success can be a challenge. By partnering with ICT Solutions, Calamatta Cuschieri have been able to meet ongoing organisational success in the cloud.
”ICT Solutions have been engaged by the CC Group to design and implement a roadmap to the Azure cloud, through their vast expertise and knowledge. The project was a success and look forward for their continuous service and implementation of upcoming new and exciting projects!
Mark BusuttilChief Information Security Officer
Key achievements
Designed and implemented a scalable cloud infrastructure to support a banking application
Cloud advisory services to build in scalability and resiliency into the platform
Managed administrative services to maintain and improve the Azure environment
Ongoing cost optimization to keep the design optimal
Built a best of breed security practice to support Calamatta Cuschieri’s regulatory needs and to address any attempts on the Azure environment
A 3 stage approach to business transformation
Architecting for the Business Goals
Moving to Azure is a journey that requires business buy in. Before even considering a cloud migration, it is critical to align the business requirements with key outcomes.
By understanding the businesses goals, and stakeholders, we were able to put together a plan to satisfy those needs. By understanding the need for agility, and the features that were fundamental to Calamatta Cuschieri.
Once this was in place, it was possible to design a foundation for Calamatta Cuschieri’s cloud requirements – not only in terms of regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS & ISO 27001, but also in terms of high availability, disaster recovery & extensibility to manage application features in future.
Building in Consistency & Quality
More than just building the baseline, it’s critical to put in place policies and blueprints in Azure to ensure that the quality is consistent.
It’s critical that if Calamatta Cuschieri’s internal teams is spinning up something in azure, they don’t need to think about identity and how authentication was going to work – because it’s already in place. That if a VM is being created, or a machine scaled up, that it is one of the pre-approved VMs in a region green-lit by Calamatta.
Even more important is that the environment has allowed connections and structures in place ready to go, with visibility over anything new created, without having to pull teeth.
With the Azure policy in place for Calamatta Cuschieri, once it’s set up, the work is done, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every single time someone decides to create something, through deployment templates, blueprints, and policies.
Managing the Cloud for Ongoing Success
By taking over administrative ownership of the cloud environment, the ICT team ensures that the Calamatta Cuschieri cloud environment is not only up to date and managed, but secure. By integrating with Azure Monitor, the ICT team can tackle any performance worries on the application in real-time before they impact user performance.
By performing ongoing cost opsonisation on the environment, ICT assists with managing the Calamatta Cuschieri Azure spend, and ensuring that budget is going where it can be most impactful.
Additionally, through policy and secure administration of the solution, ICT monitors the solution 24×7 with a backline escalation to Microsoft, giving Calamatta Cushieri the peace of mind that no matter the issue, the ICT team is on the job.