Helikon moved IT assets to "cloud"

On January 13, 2014 announced ActiveCloud by Softline integrator transfer of IT infrastructure and business applications of Helikon company in "cloud" of ActiveCloud by Softline.

Project Tasks

Till 2012 IT infrastructure of the customer was placed on own physical and virtual servers, than functioning of services and applications was ensured: Active Directory, "1C: Accounting", Microsoft SQL database servers, corporate portal, service of internal communications, file, FTP servers, telephony and so forth.

The staff increase of employees and expansion of regional network the company caused problems of shortage of capacity of servers. The available equipment and the software did not cope with the increasing loading. The staff of regional representative offices expressed dissatisfaction with the low speed of interaction with services of the company.

Two pacing factors influenced the choice of the supplier of "cloud" service: price relation and qualities, support level. The offer of ActiveCloud by Softline looked more attractively.

"We needed to increase fault tolerance of systems, having at the same time integrated local IT services in the general structure and also to have an ability to manage the volume of capacities depending on the current requirements, – Sergey Gorinov, the Chief information officer of Helikon Company LLC noted. – Transfer of IT resources of the company to "clouds" was the only option solving all assigned tasks at the same time. From the considered cloud solutions most we accepted the offer of ActiveCloud by Softline".

Project Progress

Technical specialists of ActiveCloud by Softline carried out service migration and transition to new of software in several steps. In the beginning the operating infrastructure underwent audit. As a result of a research worked architecture of a cloud solution. Collected and processed the customer's wishes on updating and optimization of services of the company.

The next stage - service migration in "cloud", software updating and implementation of a number of new services. Planning helped to transfer to "cloud" all important applications within one night.

After that implemented the internal DeskWork portal according to the SaaS model, organized service of remote desktops on the Windows Server platform 2008 R2 which provided effective and convenient access to applications via the web interface, balancing of loading and its scaling.

Project Results

In a new system the remote desktop ensures to users functioning with applications, being connected through the protected gateway. Services are available from any place in the world where there is an Internet access. Connection happens under the safe HTTPS protocol, all connections are ciphered. In case of session interruption at repeated connection all earlier started applications and the edited documents without loss of results of work will automatically be opened.

In the configured "cloud" system for the customer 15 servers work. The main services of the company are transferred to IT outsourcing: Active Directory, corporate mail, portal, backup service of network, domain and file infrastructure, mail system. It allowed to cut down considerably expenses of the organization and to provide pro-active monitoring of IT systems.

During the project several levels of backup are created: means of Windows and ActiveBackup (the simple and available solution of reservation of data), using "snapshots" (instant pictures of a status of the file system at a certain point in time).

"The project was for us very interesting and demonstrative as assumed transfer of all internal services of the customer in "cloud". Readiness of the company for transition to the most modern technologies testifies to the high level of a maturity. It is sure that many companies solving problems of hardware upgrade, software and reliability augmentation of work of services will be able to apply similar approach", - Evgeny Zhiltsov, the top manager of the ActiveCloud by Softline projects noted.