Financial use case

By Achilleas Achilleos, University of Cyprus.
Avgoustinos Constantinides, IBSCY Ltd.

Organization behind the case

IBSCY provides Cyprus IT services in order to allow companies to focus on business and not on IT problems or IT strategy of your company. IBSCY offers in Cyprus IT Services for any kind and type of business. Founded in 2004 , it is the first company in island that offers completed cloud services in Cyprus as from 2007. IBSCY hands-on experience with the majority of cloud services available in the market today, makes IBSCY one of the most fast growing companies in the Mediterranean. IBSCY clientele consists of companies from several sectors including but not limited to financial, shipping, industrial, legal, aeronautical, education and many others. IBSCY specializes on IT infrastructure, Managed services and Hosting and on a broad range of business applications.

Products & Services

IBSCY scope is to provide services and products that will enable our clients to use technology for the benefit of their organization, hence increasing their business value and profitability while at the same time organizing information and streamlining operations. Also, using technologies that we provide and implement, so that businesses could have a fast and actual ROI (Return On Investment).

All of the above can be fulfilled with the proven expertise that our engineers and Information technology consultants have due to:

• Vast amount of certifications from leading partners such as Microsoft, HP, Fujitsu and many others.
• Proven industry expertise.

IBSCY aims to provide the following professional services to Cyprus and European corporate community:

• IT Services and support, Cloud Services, Hosting Services, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Business consulting

Motivation for going to the cloud

The financial application is used principally by accountant and law firms throughout the island of Cyprus. The aforementioned application works on the basis of a client/server architecture. Currently, the application server and the database server are located inside of the company’s internal network using the on premise application. However, the final outcome with PaaSage will be to provide the ability and option for the clients of IBSAC to host application and database servers in the cloud. Moreover, PaaSage will provide the capability for IBSAC clients, for instance to select their cloud provider (e.g., based on costs) that will permanently host the financial application, un-deploy from private cloud and deploy to a public cloud that offers more resources required in a limited period of time (e.g., corporate levy payment period).

Hence, using PaaSage the financial application will be able to be totally or partially hosted in the cloud based on IBSAC clients’ preferences. For instance, application and database server could be located in a public cloud, instead of being in-house on a private cloud, based on the requirements of the customer. In other cases, since several customers are reluctant to use the public cloud due to confidentiality reasons, the database server could stay in-house on the private cloud. Even though with this scenario, companies will be able to have savings on the purchase and maintenance of the application server. In fact using PaaSage it will be straightforward, almost “with a touch of a button”, to transfer their existing application server in their preferred cloud provider. However, for organizations that do not have any issues with confidentiality, they will be able to host both application and database server in the cloud in order to get all the benefits of cloud hosting.

Objectives

Financial – Use Case

Quorum is an application consisting of several modules. One of the modules is the financial and corporate management. It is used primarily by firms offering entity management, company secretarial and fiduciary services. This solution is used by many of the major auditing, legal, trust and specialist providers. Quorum is used by clients in 25 major jurisdictions including Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta, and Singapore.

Users can keep track and enter data in relation with company management and incorporation such as bank/financial information, shareholders, directors, company capital and shares, disbursements and any other functionality that is required from the corporate registrar on a specific jurisdiction. Also, the system has functionality to auto generate all the forms required by the corporate registrar at the specific country where the system is adopted.

Quorum is used by companies with single users to large operations with 250+ users. There are two distinct solutions that cater for both client types - the on premise and the hosted solution. The hosted solution is mostly used by small clients with less than 10 users, which reduces the operational costs. The on premise solution is mostly used by corporations or companies with 10+ users. Quorum supports 250 jurisdictions worldwide and allows you to manage any company type applicable for the corresponding jurisdiction. The system comes pre-set with a number of key jurisdiction requirements but you have the flexibility to easily customize (parameterize) any of your preferred jurisdictions.

The application is a web enabled software and can be accessed from anywhere where there is an Internet connection. All you need is to have Quorum client installed on your laptop and you can connect to your office or hosted server as long as your IT administrator did the right network configuration.

The two key scenarios to be supported by PaaSage are illustrated graphically below:

Scenario 1: Scaling resources on demand and Cloud Bursting

Scenario 2: Different client requirements (including need for multi-cloud, cross-cloud deployment)

As is

The aforementioned application works on the basis of a client/server architecture. Currently, the application server and the database server are located inside of the company’s internal network using the on premise application.

As Aimed (To Be)

The final outcome with PaaSage will be to provide the ability and option for the clients of IBSAC to host application and database servers in the cloud. Moreover, PaaSage will provide the capability for IBSAC clients, for instance to select their cloud provider (e.g., based on costs) that will permanently host the financial application, un-deploy from private cloud and deploy to a public cloud that offers more resources required in a limited period of time (e.g., corporate levy payment period).

There are two very important advantages for companies that will use PaaSage:

• Rapid elasticity: With the local infrastructure in place, it is very difficult, time consuming and costly to plan beforehand for occasions that additional resources will be required from the business. Using PaaSage, IT departments can move their “infrastructure” from local to cloud when is required,
• Increased flexibility: Companies using PaaSage are not bound to one cloud provider. Actually, they can seamlessly switch a cloud provider by changing the CAMEL model.