Zema Financeira is a company based in Araxá that operates reliably in clients’ financial needs through effective and high-performance financial solutions. It’s a company that has grown significantly in recent years due to the Brazilian scenario and is always seeking new markets.
One of the main challenges faced by Zema Financeira was the limited capacity of its on-premises servers, which were resource-constrained. This bottleneck became even more critical in the face of the urgent need to implement essential services such as the Banking Payment System, PIX, Open Banking, and Brazilian Payment Systems. Additionally, migrating the database from Microsoft SQL Server 2017 to 2019 was a crucial step, and the company was determined to carry out this migration with minimal downtime. The challenge was clear: the company needed agility to implement these systems quickly, ensuring operational efficiency and uninterrupted financial services to clients. Failure to address this challenge could result in significant delays in offering innovative financial services, affecting Zema Financeira’s competitiveness in the market.
The entire ecosystem of Zema Financeira revolves around the optimal functioning and high performance of the database. Unavailability and latency were two of the main pillars that Zema Financeira needed to distance from its infrastructure, due to the new projects already planned for the future. The main concern revolved around Sicredi’s main database, which hosts a web service where proposals from suppliers and clients are constantly registered. These proposals are continuously integrated into the database and demand high performance in ensuring that more than 500 clients access simultaneously to make critical business registrations. Despite being relatively new to the market, Zema Financeira’s database environment consists of a total of 14 SQL databases summing up to almost 7 Terabytes in Storage implemented in SSD technology to meet all the institution’s demands with sub-millisecond performance, mainly due to the aforementioned payment systems.
ForceOne, renowned for its expertise in cloud solutions, played a fundamental role in resolving the challenge faced by Zema Financeira. Opting for implementation on AWS, ForceOne implemented an agile and scalable infrastructure to support the new services. Using key AWS services such as Amazon EC2 for computing and database solutions, Application Load Balancer for distributing external user loads, WAF for layer 7 application protection, and Route53 for DNS management.
Zema Financeira’s workload is predominantly based on Microsoft workloads. The applications for financial services are based on IIS, therefore, all of them were implemented on EC2 with a Windows operating system. Additionally, the main database, which is central to all business applications, is implemented on EC2 with SQL Server 2019 Standard on Windows OS. The entire server environment has AWS Backup copying server images and snapshots for storage. Productive workloads are copied to a secondary region in a disaster recovery solution.
Furthermore, through a Storage Gateway solution, it allowed integrating the MS SQL version into a file mapping and having a backup repository for files generated from the databases in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). This solution allowed for fast backups and maintaining historical files to ensure regulation and compliance. Additionally, it enabled a facilitated restore process, reducing the RPO time of the database workload.
The implementation of essential services such as the Banking Payment System, PIX, Open Banking, and Brazilian Payment Systems on AWS allowed Zema Financeira to overcome limited resource challenges and ensure a flexible infrastructure to support future growth. The use of cloud environment provided agility in implementation, reducing the time required to make new services available to clients. Zema Financeira’s migration infrastructure was based on asynchronous loads before the AWS GOLIVE, carried out between the on-premise legacy environment and EC2. From the moment of the switch, the cloud SQL server already had custom memory and disk metrics with Cloudwatch Custom Metrics. Additionally, it is worth noting that we brought Zabbix monitoring, also carried out via an EC2 server, which has metrics of various types unique to Microsoft SQL Server. This monitoring set allows ForceOne and Zema Financeira to understand the workload’s status at all times.
Zema Financeira has achieved significant results after the implementation of the solution by ForceOne. The company can enjoy the operational agility that AWS provides, with quick implementations that adapt to business demands. Furthermore, the extensive service catalog allows for application modernization projects to optimize costs on AWS and enable better performance and more resilient architectures. Some of these projects are already under development in partnership with Zema Financeira and ForceOne.
Focused on solving these challenges, Zema Financeira chose to migrate its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS), in partnership with ForceOne, a company recognized for its expertise in cloud solutions. The decision to ally with ForceOne was mainly motivated by its proven ability to carry out complex migrations efficiently and with minimal service interruption.
The migration of the Microsoft SQL Server 2017 database to 2019 was one of the most critical aspects of this process, as it involved ensuring business continuity while upgrading the infrastructure. Zema Financeira relied on ForceOne’s experience to strategically plan and execute this migration, thus minimizing the impact on business. ForceOne’s expertise enabled the migration to be carried out quickly and efficiently, ensuring that Zema Financeira could leverage the benefits of SQL Server 2019 without compromising the availability of its services.
With the successful migration of Microsoft SQL Server to AWS, Zema Financeira is prepared to face the challenges of the future with a flexible, highly available, and updated infrastructure. This partnership between Zema Financeira and ForceOne demonstrates the company’s commitment to offering high-quality financial services while remaining agile and innovative in the market.
The image on the case depicts a significant moment during the 40th Inforuso event, themed ‘Connecting Success Stories: How AWS Transforms Companies!’ The session highlighted the presence of Diego Henrique de Almeida Pereira, Coordinator of Network and IT Infrastructure at Zema Financeira, who shared the company’s fascinating journey after implementation on AWS. Tulio Henrique Café Carvalhais, COO of ForceOne, led the session, providing valuable insights. The event also featured a special appearance by Lincoln Gerken, Innovation and IT Manager at Rádio Itatiaia, sharing the inspiring success story of the broadcaster.
