Business Situation
Air Works is India’s largest independent aviation MRO and India’s first EASA-certified MRO. The company is certified to maintain 50 different types of aircraft – ranging from small, single-engine machines to turboprops plus B737s and A320s. Air Works includes Air Livery, UK which is Europe’s leading independent aircraft painting and re-finishing company, and Empire Aviation Group, Dubai which is the Middle East’s largest aircraft management services company. Hence, there has been a constant increase in aircraft maintenance data digitization and automation. To cater to this there was also a need for a highly flexible and automated backend infrastructure supporting the applications that were being developed and deployed by Air Works.
Apart from these transactional and environmental issues affecting the user experience, there was also no specific HA or DR managed for the applications running in the organizations. As a part of the next steps, Air Works was looking for a cloud solution that would meet these requirements for the migration of their applications and development of their new applications on the same line.
Air Works is India’s largest independent aviation MRO and India’s first EASA-certified MRO. The company is certified to maintain 50 different types of aircraft – ranging from small, single-engine machines to turboprops plus B737s and A320s. Air Works includes Air Livery, UK which is Europe’s leading independent aircraft painting and re-finishing company and Empire Aviation Group, Dubai which is the Middle East’s largest aircraft management services company.
Air Works is growing as an organization and their needs for digitization and automation are growing in leaps and bounds hence they have chosen Windows Azure as a growth platform and PC Solutions as a strategic partner to plan and implement their cloud adoption and migration strategy. Together Air Works with PC Solutions have successfully developed and deployed four business-critical applications and have planned for many more apps in the near future.
Solution
PC Solutions reached out to Air Works and gave a presentation on the overview of Microsoft Windows Azure offerings and the professional capabilities of the company as a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. By discussion, it was established that it was a good opportunity to migrate/develop a cloud-based solution to meet the business requirements.
Air Works and PC Solutions entered into a strategic partnership to meet the growing business needs of the company with a balance between capacity and demand. Air Works had chosen Windows Azure as a growth platform to plan and implement its cloud adoption and migration strategy. Air Works together with PC Solutions had successfully developed and deployed four business-critical applications and have planned for many more apps in the near future. The solution involved three major components:
- An Azure-based solution with dot net-based application running on the Cloud Services, SQL Azure, and Blob Storage.
- The backend administration portal was developed for the on-premise administrators to manage access to the platform with rights to add, edit, and modify users with selective rights and accesses.
- The user portal where the users can log in and access the applications: an application was developed by Air Works to automate the billing. The manpower efforts were tracked, monitored, and integrated with the invoicing system to automate the generation of invoices. This process has also been integrated with their existing ERP solution and tracks the end-to-end lifecycle of a work order. This application added a lot of value for the Air Works Finance team and helped generate considerable additional revenue.
Apart from this, we had migrated all the applications to ensure the high availability. The inherent disaster recovery features of Azure (like Geo-replication and uptime SLA guarantee) also ensure optimum availability of data and application with enhanced user delight.
Teams from different offices now work together with ease, access data, documents, and collaborate on the data from anywhere, and, are confident of a secure business environment
Benefits
The subscription-based Microsoft Windows Azure provides them with a platform to develop a customized tool that meets their requirements perfectly. At the same time, it protects business communications and sensitive information by meeting internal and regulatory compliance requirements.
Avoids Capital Investment:
Microsoft Windows Azure saves the organization from capital investment on infrastructure, hardware, or software. The hosted platform helps in reducing Capital Expenses on servers and storage. “Microsoft is responsible for patches, upgrades, and maintenance. This minimizes administration, maintenance, and hosting-related resources and costs.
Assures Security and Governance:
With the tool developed now, the users’ authentication and authorization happens only when accessed from the office premises. Furthermore, the login and IP are being tracked with the logs of the activities done by each user which helps in managing and maintaining the whole portal by the Administrators. Besides this, there are user creation, provisioning, de-provisioning, and modifying capabilities which can be done through the portal.
Improves Collaboration, Productivity
With this solution, Microsoft is responsible for patches, upgrades, and maintenance of the data center and PC Solutions for the administration, maintenance, and hosting-related resource management. This reduces the effort being invested by the Hero MotoCorp team in managing the same. The online presence of real-time data and the ability to collaborate with proper security minimizes delays over important decisions and ensures higher productivity.
Reduces Back up and Storage Risks
With real-time communication, Hero MotoCorp has gained significantly on reliability factor as Microsoft Windows Azure is always available while the service level agreement guarantees 99.99 percent uptime, thus resolving unreliability issues. PC Solutions has also been a very active partner in being there to address issues in case any come up in the functionality of the system.
Configuration Management
As a part of the solution, we developed a centralized configuration management on the cloud storage concept which was used to maintain the various versions of the code deployed and to track the changes implemented by the team. This helped in having a backup of the code and also helped in case of any roll-back and disaster scenarios.
