Mauritius Community Cargo Services cuts IT support costs by 25% with OCI

With the second-highest gross domestic product per capita in Africa, the island nation of Mauritius boasts one of the most innovative economies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Mauritius Cargo Community Services (MACCS) is a public-private partnership focused on logistics technology. Its charter is to improve the competitiveness of Mauritian products, develop a regional trade and transportation hub, and implement standards to secure an international supply chain.

Historically, MACCS employed Oracle Database to process information and collect data in support of bespoke applications and web-based services that facilitate the movement of goods along its clients’ supply chains. In 2019, due to the organization’s aging on-premises storage hardware, intermittent systems downtime negatively impacted the service quality delivered to stakeholders.

Consequently, MACCS prioritized technology modernization to establish impeccable reliability and accelerate the development and deployment of new client solutions. The company wanted to elastically scale up and down to meet client demands in a pay-by-usage model that would eliminate the need to purchase hardware and software. Additionally, the organization needed to strengthen its information security and compliance capabilities.

When the logisticis company began its cloud infrastructure evaluation, there were different cloud hosting possibilities. But Oracle worked with MACCS to develop a long-term strategy for migrating its technologies to the cloud. Oracle demonstrated that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was the right solution based on its adaptability, speed, and scalability. Oracle also articulated the ease of migrating the organization’s Oracle Enterprise Database Service and of establishing disaster recovery in a separate region. With proven high levels of local support and responsiveness, company leadership chose OCI to increase operational efficiency, optimize costs, and establish stronger data security.

After fully migrating its applications and web services to OCI and Oracle Enterprise Database Service, MACCS avoided the immediate and future costs of purchasing hardware and software associated with its on-premises data center. With Oracle’s pricing structure, the organization pays only for what’s used. This enabled the company to reduce IT support costs by 25% and reassign 66% of its IT staff from system maintenance to innovation activities. The OCI environment was implemented in-house by MACCS’ team of network and infrastructure engineers in about six months.

MACCS continuously enhances the quality of its existing services while also scaling resources more efficiently, speeding the development of new services at the requests of clients. For example, the company’s e-Bunkering service on OCI automated a paper-intensive process for supplying fuel to cargo ships, reducing the time required to complete a request from hours to just a few minutes.

OCI Security and Oracle Cloud Guard protect company data through encryption and additional layers of security that prevent unauthorized access in accordance with regulatory requirements. The company enhanced disaster recovery by establishing multiple backup environments of key data that reduce the risk of data loss and costly system downtime in event of a disaster.

Moving forward, MACCS intends to partner with existing and new clients in developing and implementing new services that take advantage of OCI’s cloud capabilities.