AWS Gives Cost-Effective Performance Boost for Argentex

As a rapidly growing company, Argentex had outgrown their private cloud environment. They turned to AWS to improve performance with a scalable solution that would meet growing demand.

The Business Challenge

Argentex, a leading foreign exchange specialist have achieved phenomenal growth since they first launched the business. This growth has led to increases in both the team size and the number of transactions being processed on a day-to-day basis. The original private cloud environment that Argentex were using was built with fewer concurrent users in mind. Upscaling the team to around 150 people and an increased demand for transactions meant that the environment wasn’t scaling in the way they wanted or needed to keep up with application and user demand, and it certainly didn’t have the right processing power. Argentex had outgrown their current private cloud environment; it had reached its limit and just couldn’t keep up with the continued growth of the company.

As the trusted technology partner for Argentex, they asked us to come up with a solution that would:

• Scale to meet growing demand
• Provide inherent resilience, enabling the business to deliver higher availability requirements
• Seamlessly migrate from the existing on-premise servers to a new scalable solution with minimal outages while the change took place
• Improve the performance for current and future users

We now have an application that supports continued growth, is scalable and solidifies a positive user experience. Synetec have proven once again that they are experts in their field.

Carl Jani, Co-CEO, Argentex

Our Solution

Our solution was to migrate from the legacy application using on-premise servers to AWS, a fully scalable, cloud-based solution. Our highly skilled developers are specialists in AWS and knew that this solution would deliver the requirements from Argentex as well as:

• Easy integration with third party providers
• Delivery of full reporting requirements
• The ability to develop, build and support the required functionality

The service is built with high availability and resiliency, across two AWS availability zones, to ensure business continuity and service availability. The AWS infrastructure and services include: EC2 for web and application hosting, Amazon RDS for the relational database, and N2WS Backup & Recovery technology to provide the backups, replication and disaster recovery functionality.

By moving to the hyper-scale AWS cloud, we knew that Argentex would be able to take advantage of all the auto-scaling features making it much easier to support continued business growth. Resource could be scaled up or down as needed providing flexibility which couldn’t be achieved with on-premise and private cloud infrastructure.

Results and Client Benefits

Because of our extensive AWS experience, we were able to migrate Argentex over to AWS quickly and efficiently. By having dual implementation, first moving the UAT environment and then moving the production environment, we were able to migrate without any issues whatsoever. Working collaboratively with their infrastructure partner and the in-house Argentex team meant that we were able to deliver the project with no outages and no bugs; it was a completely seamless move.

By working with our team to move away from an on-premise server and on to AWS, Argentex are now benefitting from:

1. Reliable and continual performance with enhanced resiliency across availability zones
2. Ease of monitoring, enabling a proactive approach to the system and the infrastructure
3. Third party integration with the FCA and data providers
4. Improvements in reporting functionality
5. No longer needing to replace costly hardware to meet increasing performance demands; AWS enables seamless lifting, upgrading and moving to the next server
6. The ability to easily monitor and keep an eye on performance, see where there are potential performance bottlenecks and fix them before they become an issue

The opportunity to further enhance performance is much more significant now than with the previous private cloud environment. We have the ability to innovate and make changes faster by taking advantage of AWS tools to simplify the deployment process. Working with our team to move to the latest cloud-based server technology means an improved performance for users and the flexible, reliable application that Argentex need to support business growth.

As our business continued to grow, we were faced with the challenge of working with a legacy infrastructure which wasn’t scalable or able to deliver what we needed to support increases in users and transactions. As a trusted partner, I knew that Synetec would use their considerable experience and skills to rise to the challenge and work collaboratively with our inhouse team to deliver the perfect solution. It was hugely important that the changes were delivered seamlessly to maintain our high standards for customer service. We now have an application that supports continued growth, is scalable and solidifies a positive user experience. Synetec have proven once again that they are experts in their field.

Carl Jani, Co-CEO, Argentex Group Plc.