Close Asset Management provides financial services for private individuals and institutional clients and their advisers. The company offers a wide range of investment management, trust, banking and advisory, educational and administrative services in the UK and internationally.
Exponential-e built a hybrid cloud for Close, integrating a new public facing website with their existing private cloud built by Exponential-e a few years before. Given the sensitive nature of the data and the applications being supported, the public cloud service is securely housed within a controlled and protected data centre and integrated into Close’s internal systems over Exponential-e’s smart wires.
Exponential-e used virtualisation to reduce the number of physical servers needed by two-thirds and to reduce the associated systems by 80%. They were able to keep hardware to a minimum and remove the need for the power, cooling, rack space and support costs associated with multiple machines.
Mukesh Bavisi, Engineering Director, Exponential-e said ”This private cloud gives Close access to additional computing power which they can flex as they need. It is also a gateway to other on-demand services contained within the cloud”.
Close’s live and pre-production environments take advantage of virtualised ICT resource delivered from the cloud. Disaster-recovery backup is provided from a second Exponential-e datacentre from where the live environment is replicated across the cloud. Two firewalls work across the environment to provide the protection needed and SAN storage is shared across the database clusters.
Once full integration is complete it will be possible to overhaul existing processes to free up silo-ed resource and consolidate hardware further. Mukesh added: “We expect to see total cost of ownership to drop even further and utilisation levels increase again”.
Exponential-e have integrated the new computing environment into Close’s existing systems and given Close’s internal support teams controlled and secure access to the system. Security is paramount. Whilst reliable and timely access is provided to data and resources for authorised users, the platform denies network communications not expressly allowed. All services and applications are authenticated and devices monitored and proactively managed.