Personetics
Personetics enables banks to offer daily data-driven personalized insights, financial advice, and automated financial wellness programs to their customers. Initially, the company’s “Engage” business solution was running on-premise within each bank’s data center, using both VMs and Dockers. Recognizing that there had been a shift in many of the apps used by several of its financial clients to Kubernetes or Software as a Service (SaaS), Personetics decided to migrate Engage to become a SaaS solution. Many organizations were using Microsoft – a strong Cloud vendor with extensive global coverage. Seeing the potential to bring the solution to a wider customer base, Personetics engaged CloudZone to help to deploy Engage in Azure.
Microsoft technology used
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- Azure Log Analytics
- Azure Database for SQL
- Azure Virtual Network (VNet)
About Personetics
Serving over 95 million bank customers worldwide, Personetics is the leading global provider of data-driven personalization and customer engagement solutions for the financial services industry. The company’s AI models help banks turn financial data into proactive, personalized real-time insights and advice for their retail, small business and wealth management customers. Putting customer needs first, its banking solution, Engage, keeps customers informed, using predictive analytics to empower them to stay on top of their financial affairs.
The Challenge
Personetics was clear that it needed to get “Engage” onto Azure to make it more accessible for its bank clients using this platform. Implementing the solution in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) would also decrease the time-to-market and enable a faster reaction to client demands. The company’s in-house expertise was in AWS, so it turned to CloudZone for help with an initial project – moving the product into the Azure Marketplace so that banks could run a demo proof of concept in their Azure environment. Now, in a second project, Personetics went back to CloudZone to further develop its new SaaS solution, automating the landing zone and application infrastructure deployment to Azure, using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Because of the company’s wide global reach, “Engage” also needed to be deployable in the different geographic regions where Personetics’ clients operate – including the US, Europe and other regions – to minimize latency, ensure a smooth user experience, and take into account relevant local regulations.
The Azure MSP Solution
The main goal of the project was to provide IaC that would enable Personetics to automatically deploy ״Engage״ as a SaaS product, along with all its dependencies – AKS, monitoring, log analytics, security, network etc. – into Azure, in all the relevant regions.
CloudZone used its expertise in a wide range of Azure tools and technologies to complete the project.
- Automated creation of infrastructure – using Terraform to write the code, CloudZone automated creation of the infrastructure of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with all the common services needed, and implemented security and logging. Prometheus was used for monitoring, including Prometheus Federation which enables consolidation of all time-series metrics, from all environments, into a single Prometheus database. FluentD was implemented to ship all logs from inside Kubernetes to Azure Log Analytics.
- Managed Kubernetes service – by using AKS for fully-managed Kubernetes container orchestration, Personetics can focus on fast, agile deployment, without worrying about autoscaling, high availability or OS management.
- Networking – using hub-and-spoke network methodology, CloudZone created a central management location to give Personetics a single pain of glass into its SaaS deployments.
- Managed database service – instead of deploying Personetics’ Engage databases on self-provisioned servers, CloudZone took advantage of the Azure Database for SQL to decrease the overhead costs of database administration.
- Secured data accessibility – leveraging Azure Virtual Network service endpoints and SQL PaaS, CloudZone was able to connect AKS, hosting the Engage application to the databases using Azure backbones, instead of sending it over the internet. With the Azure-managed SQL Firewall feature, CloudZone was able to increase the safety of data transfer abilities.
The Results
Since going live with Azure in July 2020, Personetics has seen a lot of interest in the market. Multiple deals have already been closed and many more are at various stages of the sales cycle.
“Banks are looking for ways to build long-term relationships with their customers, and thanks to CloudZone’s expert support, we are now able to offer them a secure, scalable service to meet their business needs on Azure platform” says Sharon Atlas-BenDavid, Director of cloud services at personetics .
