Pushing technical boundaries and international borders for Intelliflo

Intelliflo, Invesco is a financial services product provider, servicing $1 trillion assets across its platforms. Acquired by Invesco in 2018, the company turned its focus to global markets; namely opening access to its applications to Australia, Germany and Canada.

The Challenge

To service a global customer based, Intelliflo needed to modernise its applications; relocating its suite of on-premises business applications to a Cloud platform capable of hosting its customer data.

Like many businesses migrating to the Cloud, Intelliflo needed an environment that provided a secure location for the development and automated test of applications. Their staging to production also required a secure automated delivery pipeline with the associated audit controls.

The Solution

After an initial discovery stage, we initiated several enablement phases that ensured Intelliflo’s team formed an element of the project team and aligned specifically to areas of improvement. These were:

Application deployments reliant on Microsoft SQL server database and credentials being created on a per-app basis by the internal operations slowing deployment.
The storage of unrestricted amounts of customer data with high levels of availability and redundancy,
Support of large amounts of application containerisation with scalable hosting platforms,
Having a central store for infrastructure and application logs, infrastructure monitoring on containers and virtual machines.

Work began in August 2019 and in January 2020, the environment was ready for the containerisation and relocation of applications. Within the next month, the deployment of business applications was extended from the United Kingdom to Asia Pacific.

The Benefits

Migrating their application estate to an AWS platform has provided Intelliflo a Cloud infrastructure capable of supporting its global business. This project also successfully safeguarded its existing applications portfolio and augmentation for at least the next five years. Other benefits include:

Reduced overall IT operating costs through a DevOps model and shared Cloud platform.
Centralised regulatory and compliance controls through a common technology platform and security model.
The product change cycle was reduced from 24 hours to 1 hour and can easily cater for a 100% increase in the volume of changes.
The use of Terraform Cloud to provision the test, pre-production and production environments significantly reduced the manual effort required to create environments. These can now be provisioned within minutes through a Service Catalogue.
Increased flexibility and future proofing through a solution landscape defined using infrastructure as code.