Founded in 2015, a leading technology corporation merged with AR/VR Research Group of one of the most prestigious research institute of Taiwan, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). After the merge, this corporation with a head count over 100 received fund by internationally recognized ventures and development funds including National Development Fund, Alibaba Entepreneurs Fund, Taya Venture, etc. Headquartered in Taiwan, with approximately 50 members, this corporation has branched in Silicon Valley of US, Europe, China, and Hongkong.

Their cutting-edge expertise in AR/VR content platforms leads to their global strategic partnership with Google, Intel, ARM, Microsoft, ASUS, etc. Services of this corporation includes AR/VR adaptation in the real estate, design, furnishing, e-commerce, and tourism industry, expanding their global market to 20+ countries in North America, Central America, Europe, Asia, and Middle East.

Challenge

This corporation’s technical employees frequently travel overseas to support their customers. Therefore, a secure easy-access network to their company’s resources such as virtual machines is crucial to their customer success objective. Their most recent approach is to connect to the company VPN/SSH for VM access, but this method is cumbersome to their employees.

Their VMs are split between various regions of VNet, which drastically increases the complexity of resource access. Other than the inconvenience of the current approach, this corporation has concern about the possible security breach during the pandemic. As more companies began to work at home, more attacks on company network is anticipated. Therefore, they deliver this difficulty to the Caloudi Migration team.

Choice of Cloud Migration- Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is a smart, cost-effective public cloud that assists organizations to remain competitive and profitable. By adopting Microsoft Azure, organizations can optimize cost, speed up the delivery of solutions, and focus on higher impact work.

According to Microsoft research, organizations save up to 80% of their spending on Windows server and increase 25% in IT productivity using Microsoft Azure. In addition, organizations can enjoy scalable storage, stronger data security, task automation, and plenty of cloud services while utilizing Microsoft Azure to meet each company’s cloud usage demands.

Solution

We proposed Azure Bastion solution in order to tackle this global on-demand accessibility and security issue.

Our plan of approach involves the deployment of Bastion Resource in VNet and using RDP/SSH to connect to VM. Since Bastion Resource allow the use of entirely private company VM without the use of Public IP diminishes the possibility of successful cyber-attacks. This solution introduces simplicity, mobility, and automation to VM access. Members of this corporation can simply connect to VM through Azure Portal using any browser that supports HTML5.

A click on the “connect” button after selecting RDP/SSH connection option is all that is needed to access VM with minimal cost and secured connection. During times where VM connection is no longer needed, Bastion Resource can be cancelled effortlessly and re-deployed at ease using ARM template.

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Customer About

Founded in 2015, this leading corporation has merged with AR/VR Research Group of one of the most prestigious research institute of Taiwan, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). After the merge, this corporation with a head count over 100 became a mid-size corporation and was then funded by internationally recognized ventures and development funds including National Development Fund, Alibaba Entepreneurs Fund, Taya Venture, etc.

Headquartered in Taiwan, this corporation has branched in Silicon Valley of US, Europe, China, and Hongkong. Their cutting-edge expertise in AR/VR content platforms has led to their global strategic partnership with Google, Intel, ARM, Microsoft, ASUS, etc. Services of iStaging includes AR/VR adaptation in the real estate, design, furnishing, e-commerce, and tourism industry, expanding their global market to 20+ countries in North America, Central America, Europe, Asia, and Middle East.

Challenge

Due to the pandemic, global demand of AR/VR/MR applications has drastically increased. Many companies reached a high in its workload and traffic for their web applications. As an AR/VR/MR professional, the leading corporation has predicted a high in its workload and traffic with their applications in the construction of a wholesome experience of luxury flagships.

During research and development stage, they started with on-premises environment but this would not be the end goal. Their 360 AR/VR application should satisfy the requirements for secure public access, ability to withstand traffic, and uninterrupted on-demand access with minimal cost. They have delivered their concerns and requirements to Caloudi for a migration plan.

Choice of Cloud Migration- Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is a smart, cost-effective public cloud that assists organizations to remain competitive and profitable. By adopting Microsoft Azure, organizations can optimize cost, speed up the delivery of solutions, and focus on higher impact work.

According to Microsoft research, organizations save up to 80% of their spending on Windows server and increase 25% in IT productivity using Microsoft Azure. In addition, organizations can enjoy scalable storage, stronger data security, task automation, and plenty of cloud services while utilizing Microsoft Azure to meet each company’s cloud usage demands.

Solution

Caloudi has proposed a cloud migration strategy for this leading corporation to move from on-premises to Azure in order to leverage the deployment of Azure services while taking high availability and scalability into consideration. This corporation’s current infrastructure design is a 4-layer structure with only a single host.

To tackle their challenge, our cloud migration plan includes a 4-tier structure that has multiple databases, application servers, and web servers. Whereas their current on-premises SQL server and API server becomes multiple SQL Databases and API servers incorporating always-on availability group, 99.99% SLA, with zone redundancy when applicable. Whereas their on-premises ASP.NET web application becomes multiple app services, one per customer with its appropriate app service plan depending on its customer needs. This solution has migrated this corporation’s initial research onto the cloud, prepared for large scale public access.

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Customer About

A mid-size corporation of 120 employees, founded in 1990 and headquartered in New Jersey of USA, has been known for its competency in systems integration of network, software, and communications.

Since its establishment, this corporation has been committed to the software development of the internal management systems of government agencies. It has deployed systems integration services for police, justice, intelligence, and fire departments of New Jersey, Hawaii, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Oklahoma state government agencies. The core business of this corporation revolves around integrating software systems that integrates case, file, personnel, image processing, and crime analysis management.

Aligned with United States’ current homeland security strategy, this corporation has worked with forensics expert Dr. Henry Lee to develop a smart crime detection, prevention, and security systems that can be used by police departments.

Challenge

This corporation has started a financial fraud detection and prevention project using forecasting and anomaly detection of time-series data. They have completed their initial research and development stage, with the final goal of allowing secure public access to this research.

During this stage, this corporation strives to develop an on-demand access, secure client-facing, API and SQL server during pilot testing. In addition, they would like to construct an environment to simplify their development process and leverage cloud services for future research purposes.

Choice of Cloud Migration- Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is a smart, cost-effective public cloud that assists organizations to remain competitive and profitable. By adopting Microsoft Azure, organizations can optimize cost, speed up the delivery of solutions, and focus on higher impact work.

According to Microsoft research, organizations save up to 80% of their spending on Windows server and increase 25% in IT productivity using Microsoft Azure. In addition, organizations can enjoy scalable storage, stronger data security, task automation, and plenty of cloud services while utilizing Microsoft Azure to meet each company’s cloud usage demands.

Solution

To achieve a secure, on-demand, client-facing API and SQL server, we proposed an Azure Windows and SQL server migration solution for this corporation. After client engagement, we’ve understood that currently, this corporation uses VMware vSphere ESXi to manage their VMs and wishes to adopt the use of Azure for cloud migration and use many PaaS-based azure services in the future.

The main step of our migration plan involves the migration of SQL Server to Azure SQL Database, API server to Windows server VM with RDP Support, with the adoption of VPN Gateway and On-premises strengthened workstation. This solution allowed this corporation to be prepared for secure public access, implementation of high availability service with guaranteed uptime, and future Azure service adaptation.

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