Client background

Client: Oil giant in the Middle East

Industry: Energy, natural resources & utilities

Products or services: Oil & Gas

Geography or areas of operations: Iraq

Number of customers/who are their customers? Major oil companies

Any other relevant detail such as total annual revenue: One of the largest oil fields in the world, produces about 1.45 million barrels of oil per day

Challenge

The client had a high dependency on critical IT applications and domain controllers that needed to run in a highly available environment. The environment consisted of a finance-related application, an asset management tool and a middleware ETL tool bringing these two applications together. A domain controller and the above applications would need to be set up for disaster recovery. The Hardware EOL / Contract for Current DR was expiring and the client needed to have an alternate solution in place for DR, with an equivalent and similar business continuity plan. Also, the primary data centre for the client was located in Basra, Iraq and operational support was being provided remotely.

Solution

• Cloud deployment for the company was done with IaaS on Azure and Azure Site Recovery for DR.
  
• Cloud-based VM servers were built for data centers. Moreover, the DB servers had active DataGuard and SQL Always on for database high availability.
  
• An Express Route was created with Site-to-Site VPN. The Express Route coupled with both Microsoft Peering & Azure Private Peering, making the connections more secure.
• The SQL 2014 Enterprise edition was deployed on Azure which acts as counterpart to the on-premise SQL server and enables the Always ON feature, thereby keeping the databases in DR ready mode.
• The Oracle DataGuard replication was used for replicating the on-premise Oracle database to cloud. An additional Domain Controller (ADC) was deployed on Azure for authentication.
• A Point-to-Site (P2S) solution was developed for access to the Cloud Infrastructure virtually anywhere from the world in case of an unforeseen real disaster at the on-premise location.
  

Business impact

• A highly available, robust and secure DR solution was set up, which was not only cost-effective but was geographically isolated, altogether in a different continent.
  
• Wipro also implemented Azure best security practices, thereby completely isolating all layers/components getting directly accessed from the internet.
  
• The solution helped the client reduce infrastructure costs in compliance with their SLAs.
  
• A real-time replication for application and database layer was implemented thus helping the customer achieve their desired RPO/RTO values.

“Wipro provided a flexible, robust, cost-effective and geographically secure solution to the client on Azure Cloud Platform. This has led to increased disaster recoverability and better accessibility to the client from a DR perspective.”

-Venkata Guru Prasad Kandarpi Global Head for Microsoft Application Services, Wipro