Technology
Philippines
SME/Startup
"The technology stack that we got from Alibaba Cloud is what we need, and we can expand it more when the requirements are there. It is about seamless integration and a local support team that we can easily call upon when needed."
Aureo Castillo
Managing Director, Workcentric
About Workcentric
Workcentric is a local software consultancy firm with over 20 years of expertise, providing advanced technology and services to government agencies and private enterprises in the Philippines. They specialize in financial and operations performance management (FOPM), data warehousing, data integration, business analytics, and process automations.
Challenge
Workcentric developed a budget planning and management app mainly managed on-premise. In the previous setup, they experienced the following pain points, which drove them to look for an agile, efficient, and innovative alternative. Workcentric encountered many challenges:• Difficulty scaling the workloads up and down when needed
• Higher IT cost to manage and maintain the on-premise system
• Disorganization when mitigating security threats
One of the main goals is to migrate these workloads to the cloud and keep the cost manageable with a pay-as-you-go model. Workcentric needed a provider with a good breadth of services, including a comprehensive portfolio of security solutions to comply with security and compliance regulations.
Why Alibaba Cloud
Workcentric reached out to Alibaba Cloud through its distributor, VSTECS. Alibaba Cloud and VSTECS worked proactively with Workcentric’s Team to come up with a well-architected framework to address requirements and challenges as they transitioned from on-premise to the cloud.
With Alibaba Cloud’s local data center and presence in the Philippines, it was an easy choice for Workcentric to integrate Alibaba Cloud solutions, especially when compared to other cloud providers. Workcentric took advantage of lower latencies, hosting workloads in the Philippines data center and swift service (courtesy of VSTECS).
Workcentric adopted a mixture of Alibaba Cloud security products, allowing more room for intelligent detection and protection systems.
Alibaba Cloud helped Workcentric comply with local laws and regulations seamlessly and efficiently.
Architecture
The framework involves Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances, enabling the Workcentric Team to achieve faster results from initial testing to live production. Multiple ECS instances were configured to achieve a high level of SLA, and Application Load Balancer (ALB) was also deployed to balance the traffic among those ECS instances. ALB helped Workcentric become elastic, scale on-demand, and manage large amounts of network traffic.
Since the application also needed a way to share important, unstructured data among its users, Object Storage Services (OSS) played an important role in this architecture, sharing those data/objects with high durability and scalability.
Regarding database management, Workcentric wanted to have fully hosted database services. ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL was the logical choice since their application was built on-premise using a MySQL database.
Since housing important budgeting and planning data was another key priority, the cloud environment ensured protection from ransomware, various malware, and web tampering through Alibaba Cloud’s Security Center. As an added layer of security, Alibaba Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF) was deployed for zero-day vulnerabilities in the web application layer.
Looking Forward
Workcentric (in partnership with Alibaba Cloud and VSTECS) will continue to expand the capacity and capability of its system, including adding automation functions, aiming to further its cloud adoption in-house and for its clientele.
Featured Products
Elastic and secure virtual cloud servers to cater all your cloud hosting needs.
Server Load Balancer (SLB) distributes network traffic across groups of backend servers to improve the service capability and application availability. It Includes Layer 4 Network Load Balancer (NLB), Layer 7 Application Load Balancer (ALB), and Classic Load Balancer (CLB).
A fully hosted online database service that supports MySQL 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, and 8.0.
Fully managed object storage service to store and access any amount of data from anywhere
A unified security management system that identifies, analyzes, and notifies you of security threats in real time
Protects your websites and web servers based on the intelligent computing capabilities of Alibaba Cloud Security
Other Related Stories
ABS-CBN
With Alibaba Cloud's highly secure and reliable cloud computing services, ABS-CBN is able to reliably protect its data and virtually produce content anywhere in the world.
GCash
Rapid user growth posed a challenge for GCash, an innovative FinTech company that was using a legacy on-premise platform. To scale, it needed a partner with world-class cloud solutions.
Hang Seng Bank
Alibaba Cloud employs its comprehensive cloud architecture to build an open, unified, and reliable enterprise-class cloud platform for Hang Seng Bank.
DANA
DANA is a leading digital wallet provider in Indonesia with over 85 million users and 5 million daily average transactions. DANA is an all-in-one app that allows users to safely make cashless and cardless payments for everyday usage.
Snapshot
Workcentric leverages Alibaba Cloud's ECS, ALB, OSS, ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL, Security Center, and Web Application Firewall solution to improve the efficiency of its system while staying compliant.
Product/Solution Used
View More Solutions
A Free Trial That Lets You Build Big!
Start building with 50+ products and up to 12 months usage for Elastic Compute Service
Get Started for Free Get Started for Free
