Hero FinCorp Achieves High Availability & Security on Amazon Cloud

Hero FinCorp (HFC) is a non-banking financial corporation engaged in consumer finance and commercial lending. Consumer finance includes Hero MotorCorp two wheelers while commercial lending offers a wide portfolio of products including working capital loans and machine loans amongst others.

01. Customer Challenge

HFC is using FinnOne, a loan lifecycle management software to manage its lending business which covers initial contact with customer, loan servicing and delinquency management.

The customer wanted to migrate the application to AWS Cloud for the following reasons:

The company was ramping its geographic presence and needed quick roll out of IT infrastructure. FinnOne which was deployed on-prem was not equipped to support rapid business expansion.
The customer wanted very high availability of FinnOne since it supports core business processes and its non-availability brings business to a halt.
Being a financial services provider, needed adherence to stringent compliance and security at scale.
HFC wanted seamless migration to AWS Cloud wherein user experience is not affected.

Noventiq’s Solution

We configured FinnOne deployment in AWS Mumbai region leveraging AWS Well-Architected Framework which includes using two availability zones (AZs) to ensure applications are always available. The architecture ensures HFC applications and database will run independently and simultaneously in two AWS regions, so core operations will remain unaffected even if one region goes down.

Further HFC corporate office has been connected to AWS region with a Direct Connect service to ensure security and high-speed data transfer.

Since close monitoring is equally important to ensure availability, so AWS Managed services CloudWatch along with third-party tool CloudHealth keep track of application and database metrics via dashboards and alerts to take proactive measures whenever required.

We used several best practices including layered architecture segregating application and database while filtering traffic to these layers via another virtual network. Separate environments for production and development purposes have also been configured for higher compliance.

Another best practice is to minimize the surface area of attack and we used the policy of least privilege access based on security groups. At the resource level we configured CIS best practices to harden virtual servers, widely used in financial services. Also AWS log monitoring service keeps a close watch on who accesses what resources.
Migration timing was chosen carefully on a weekend during regular maintenance, so business operations were not affected at all.

” Thanks to Noventiq’s expertise and experience, we worked seamlessly as an extended team and managed a complex migration involving core operations which has been a game changer enabling us to move quickly as a business while achieving security at scale. The benefits that have accrued by migrating to AWS Cloud is convincing enough to consider the next steps in Cloud deployment.”

Shiv Kumar

Infrastructure Head

03. Benefits

Business roll out in different locations is being easily facilitated by quick access to core business application with deployment on AWS Cloud. HFC is able to start operations in a new location within three days as opposed to weeks earlier.
Application has experienced zero downtime as Well Architected Framework ensures auto failover and data backup ensures business continuity.
Continuous compliance and security with monitoring tools and alerts which reduces time to detection and remediation.
Seamless migration during non-working hours ensured minimal business disruption.