ConCrédito significantly reduces IT costs, boosts internal collaboration and empowers its customers with Google Cloud
The Challenge
As one of the largest sustainable microfinance institutions in Mexico, ConCrédito, is always on the lookout for opportunities to improve both the degree of collaboration among its members and the relationship with their customers. With an experienced and specialized internal development IT team, they have always been regarded as innovators when it comes to technologies, especially those with which the customer interacts.
In contrast, the company was having trouble both establishing a single internal collaboration platform and finding the right infrastructure provider for its ever growing technology needs. Their current infrastructure was being hosted in a hybrid environment composed of on-premise servers and AWS. Attaining cost reductions on its infrastructure was one of their primary concerns. They had the certainty that this could be achieved with an elastic architecture, however, so far they hadn’t found the right technology partner that could provide them with the right platform for their needs. That’s until Google Cloud came in…
Regarding internal collaboration and communication, this vision was slow to be implemented across the company’s internal technologies and in 2016 ConCrédito was still running a diverse group of legacy systems that did not provide them the functionalities they needed . These outdated systems were difficult to update, prone to disruptions and outages and did not interact with each other.
It’s important to consider that Concredito is a company with independent commercial units, where the person responsible for the granted credit (who has the credit line) is always out of office and work through a mobile application developed internally. This forces employees to have communication restrictions between the people who approve the credit lines, those who disperse and those who deliver the documentation so that the process is fluid and correct.
The Solution
ConCrédito decided to team up with Nubosoft in this endeavor. Our team worked hand in hand defining the right strategy to help ConCrédito in their journey to Google Cloud. The overall project was established in three main phases; firstly, their email, file server, communication and collaboration legacy systems for every single of their more than 1,000 employees would be migrated to G Suite.
Through the G Suite platform, the problem of collaborating from mobile devices could be solved safely and easily, without additional costs as possible investments in external MDM. Additionally, with Google Hangouts & Google Hangouts Meet, they were able to establish a clear and official line of communication with the Concredito management team. Finally, being communication where lines of credit are approved, Google Vault allows auditing the correct granting of credits and keep the process transparent for participants.
Secondly, their server infrastructure would be entirely migrated to Google Cloud Platform using several services such as Compute Engine, Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL; finally, their development team would start taking advantage of other tools provided in GCP, such as Firebase and BigQuery.
Dozens of Windows and Linux virtualized servers were migrated to Compute Engine and others were created in the new platform from scratch. It ensured that the company’s core applications were well integrated. To resolve security concerns, our team of cloud architects team guided them migrate their Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) as well . Gmail took over their legacy email system was and their internal file server was replaced with Google Drive.
In Nubosoft, the company found the business partner it needed in their journey to the cloud. Today, after roughly a year of accomplishing their migration process, ConCrédito has reduced both its licensing and hardware costs, they have attained a high degree of agility in their continuous development process and their system’s overall uptime has been greatly improved.
In the next few months, they will continue working with our team exploring big data solutions to analyze their loan portfolio, extend their web and mobile apps functionalities and start developing and internal data engineers team in order to develop proprietary machine learning models.
