Customer Situation
There are many technical and design teams of Hero MotoCorp with bases out of Europe, North America, and India. These teams have to work in coherence on various assignments sharing the progress of work with the other teams. While collaborating with each other, care was to be taken that there was no potential threat to the Intellectual Property being developed while sharing it.
Hero MotoCorp was earlier using a cloud solution which posed a lot of security and tracking challenges during collaboration. To cater to these challenges, Hero MotoCorp developed a solution based on the Microsoft Azure platform with the assistance of PC Solutions which resulted in a reliable, secure platform where storage, service support, and security issues have been taken care of as per their business requirements.
Hero MotoCorp Ltd. (formerly Hero Honda Motors Ltd.) has been the world’s largest manufacturer of two–wheelers for the last 12 years in a row. The company sells more than 6 million two-wheelers in a year and has a huge focus on operational efficiencies and customer relationships. Hero MotoCorp Ltd. has a very strong IT base and is a pioneer in adopting leading-edge technologies.
The Organization had a decentralized team working from various geographical locations and they were already using a cloud solution which was posing a lot of challenges in terms of security and tracking of the data being shared. Along with the implementation partner, PC Solutions, they developed a solution on the Microsoft Windows Azure platform which provided them with a reliable, secure platform where storage, service support, and security suited their business requirements.
Partner Solution and Microsoft Technology
Hero MotoCorp evaluated the offerings & capabilities of the Azure platform and involved PC Solutions Pvt Ltd. because of their professional capabilities on the platform being a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Through discussions, it was realized that a customized solution could be built using the Azure platform which suited the business requirements for collaboration keeping in mind the various concerns for granularity, security, and availability.
PC Solutions along with the Hero MotoCorp team did a deep dive envisioning and planning to design a solution based on the understanding of their business needs and challenges. The solution involves three major components:
- The 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 is where the users can log in and upload, download, and share their documents with their counterparts. An IP-based security was enabled on the application to ensure that the users could not access the same from outside the office premises. The other aspect was the close integration of the platform with email alerts and detailed activity logging by all the users on the platform. Hero MotoCorp also signed the Azure Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft as a strategic decision to move to the Azure Cloud.
Teams from different offices now work together with ease, access documents, and collaborate with each other from anywhere, and, are confident of a secure business environment.
Benefits
The subscription-based Microsoft Windows Azure provides them a platform to develop customized tools to meet the needs as desired, and also at the same time protect business communications and sensitive information as required by internal and regulatory compliance.
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.
Guarantees 99.99% Uptime
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.
Reduces Back up and Storage Risks
There is built-in Disaster recovery and geo-replication that is available with Microsoft Windows Azure. It ensures that there is no data loss on the cloud from the data center even in the case of any physical issues at the data center. Hence there is no need to take manual backups and maintain on-premise storage of the data that is already being replicated on the Azure Cloud.
