THE CHALLENGE:
The customer was engaged with experts from Tata Communications in making their digital estate more simple, scalable & seamless. This was an ongoing effort with the expansion of their application suite across multiple clouds – augmenting more clouds and adding multiple regions necessitated the need to simplify. In the midst of this, the de-merger was announced, and we were asked to also prepare a blueprint for readiness of how they could initiate the segregation of digital assets across multiple clouds, while not disturbing the day-to-day operations? This was like dismantling an aircraft into 2 flying objects, doing it all the while the aircraft was in flight!
THE SOLUTION:
Before we get to the solution we proposed, it might be of interest to know the nature of the digital landscape itself for its complexity. We were looking at:
- Multiple network underlay service providers, including Tata Communications.
- An SDWAN solution operating on top of these hybrid underlays.
- Data centers (DC) across multiple locations spread over India, with applications hosted on these DCs, while other applications also ran on public clouds, viz., AWS, Azure, & Oracle. One of the DCs was also a DR site.
- 50+ branch locations and several multiples of their partner ecosystem engaged into this central IT infrastructure via private connections and public internet links.
Our Tata Communications IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect solution brought all the 3 imperatives – simplify, scalable & seamless together, to address this de-merger challenge. The best place to initiate such a de-merger of IT infrastructure is closest to the applications. Our proposition and its value played in like a just in time solution for our customer’s IT Team, by helping them disintegrate the cloud application assets, creating isolated network pathways while simplifying the branch side estate changes to minimal. The solution proposed the IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect network hub to act as a common ground for the clouds and applications hosted on them on one side, and the DCs and branch networks on the other side.
THE RESULTANT OUTCOMES FOR THE CUSTOMER:
As the de-merger gets into full swing, the customer can reap the following benefits from our proposed solution:
- Doubling (2X) the speed it would have otherwise taken, in splitting the IT infrastructure and cloud estate, thus assisting in halving the time of the de-merger efforts, given the deployment of the multi cloud hub clearly ear marks the two businesses right at the source of their data and applications.
- In addition, the multi cloud hub facilitates atleast a 5X speed of data transfer between the clouds, which otherwise would take Internet or data center hairpinning – which is not an efficient architecture for critical cross-cloud communication.
- The cost savings accrued from reducing the landing zone sprawl and the associated network and security gears, reduced capacity at the data center infrastructure and more efficient application response.
WHAT WE LEARNT:
Customers value operational simplicity offered by a trusted business partner with a consultative approach, deep technical expertise and the credibility for managing complexity with guaranteed, 99.5% or above uptime SLAs – and all of this while savings costs by implementing such solutions. Visit Tata Communications IZO™ Multi Cloud Connect to know more.
Mergers or de-mergers are largely known to be all about markets, products, customers, share prices, people, cultures, etc. However, an important aspect that is the underbelly for success or failure of such mergers or de-mergers is their IT infrastructure. Where mergers can complicate things by duplicating subscriptions, SaaS applications, and customer-facing, IT-enabled touchpoints, de-mergers require duplicating requirements, splitting or sharing common resources, all the while attempting to keep the end customer untouched by the chaos of it all. One such de-merger was announced last year (Mar’24) and this involved splitting of a vehicle manufacturing company into 2 parts for strategic reasons. The work to execute the de-merger began soon after the announcement, with a deadline to get it all done by late 2025. Tata Communications has been and will continue to be a close partner in shaping the technology landscape of this customer, and we promptly swung into action on the IT infrastructure front as well.