In an era of rapid technological development, a significant
role is played by the willingness to seriously change the company's IT
infrastructure, as well as the ability to predict the impact of these changes.
Economic and political factors, changes in legislation, behavior of regulators
require special attention on the part of the company's management.
IT did not cope with the active growth
The history of IPT Group began once with a staff of 50
people. Rapid growth has increased the company's turnover by ten times, and in
2007, as a confident player, it entered the market of legal and financial
consulting. Then it's time to develop new business areas: property management,
management of collective investments, management of a network of medical
clinics and development. In 2014, already in the status of a company of federal
scale, IPT Group accompanied the Sberbank CIB deal for ₽2.1 billion, and a year
later restructured a large international holding with an annual turnover of ₽47
billion. The staff exceeded the 1200 mark.
"Of course, such a high pace of development required a
revision of the company's internal IT policy. However, with the growth in the
number of employees, the cost of IT infrastructure began to grow
proportionally, although it was expected that the scale effect would affect,
"says Mikhail Sbitnikov, director of the IT department.
The inefficiency of the previous architecture was manifested
in the obvious decline in the quality of IT services: the speed of response to
staff requests decreased, the computer information systems disruptions became
more frequent. The costs of IT infrastructure became increasingly opaque and
incomprehensible to management. To solve the problem, IPT Group attracted IT
operator TeleTower.
"When we started working on the project, we saw that
the company had a lot of problems in the IT field, which were expressed in
constant failures in corporate information systems (KIS), up to the loss of
data. The IT team often engaged in "extinguishing the fire," not
coping with various systems, which during the time of exponential and
uncontrolled growth accumulated abound. The low productivity of CIS ultimately
influenced the main business processes of the whole company, "explains
Ilya Vakhrushev, TeleTower general director.
Migration with simultaneous modernization
The key and first step of "TeleTower" was the
complete transfer of IPT Group's IT systems to the cloud infrastructure.
Migration did not become a trivial transfer of data: during the work debugging
and reengineering of a variety of business processes was conducted. In
particular, a detailed check of all servers and services, their inventory and
criticality assessment for the business was carried out. Thus, to the basic expectations
from the use of cloud technologies, increased productivity and reliability of
the entire infrastructure were added.
"In addition, the business together with us decided on
the expediency of investing money in new own equipment as opposed to monthly
payments to the outsourcing team," Ilya Vakhrushev said. - Here we first
applied a careful approach in calculating the cost of ownership of the
infrastructure. Everything was taken into account literally: from the salaries
of system administrators and consumables to the discounted cash flow and
managerial risks of delegation of responsibility. As a result, a model was
chosen with periodic payments. "
All these measures, as demonstrated by the further
development of the events, gave the IPT Group the opportunity to pay more
attention to short-term IT projects for the implementation of which
"extra" money appeared, and the head of the profile department of the
company is now engaged in exactly what should be done by CIO - Processes across
the entire group of companies. The introduction of various services has become
more thoughtful and has benefited end users.
The T-Cloud platform, created in the company, implies the
provision of services based on the SaaS model. The group of companies in 24/7
mode uses more than 600 virtual cores, 2 TB of RAM and 150 terabytes of stored
data.
DPC: seven years without accidents
The second key step was the creation of a distributed
failover multivendor system. The Cloud T-Cloud functions primarily on Dell and
IBM hardware running Microsoft System Center.
"Most of the" iron "is concentrated in our
data center on the territory of" Moscow City ", - comments Ilya
Vakhrushev. - And to ensure disaster-proofing, we use our own sites in the
south of Moscow and, in part, in the Central Administrative District. For more
than 7 years, there have been no emergencies in our data center, indicating
that we have built a truly reliable system. In addition, at least two
communication channels are used at each facility to ensure reliability and connectivity.
"
Process and result
The cost of IT became transparent and understandable for
business owners. The phased migration principle allowed the services to be
modernized one by one, which helped to reduce to zero the impact of the
adjustment itself on work processes.
The entire IT infrastructure is transferred to the
outsourcing model for 2 years, for a company with such a number of directions
this is a very short time. The single support service, in addition to
IT-requests, now accepts service requests for the operation of buildings.
Including, the service approach to change of medical receptions and price lists
for a network of medical clinics is realized, the system of an estimation of
satisfaction of clients and quality assurance of service services is
introduced. The performance of information systems is stabilized during peak
hours due to the use of a multi-level data storage system.
The main result of the work was the complete migration of
the IT infrastructure of IPT Group to the cloud T-Cloud. There was also a place
for pleasant bonuses. In particular, new business services were launched for
the company, for example, the time recording system, videoconferencing, secure
collective access to documents, etc.
Another important change was the organization of a single
entry point for technical support of various activities of the IPT Group. We
are talking about the creation of a single round-the-clock technical support
service for users based on OTRS software.
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