Abans accelerates time to market and reduces vulnerability with OCI

Abans Group is one of the largest consumer electronics and appliances retailers in Sri Lanka. The group of companies has been built through entrepreneurial spirit and an authentic sense of empathy for its customers. The company’s legacy on-premises data center supported a best-of-breed applications strategy on an Oracle database. However, as the business grew and its operations diversified, Abans struggled to scale the platform to meet increased demand for five different business sectors.

Procuring the necessary secured infrastructure became difficult, often due to supply chain challenges. These factors negatively impacted time to market and degraded staff morale. Setting up each new entity was time-consuming and resource-intensive. Overall system availability was at risk during peak transactional days at the end of each month. To solve these operational and security challenges, Abans looked for the best suitable public cloud to meet its needs.

Based on its existing relationship with Oracle, Abans created a pilot project for running its revenue-generating supply chain management application, which supports end-to-end supply chain workloads.

The company reviewed solutions from others in the market, but Abans selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as one of its cloud platform providers. The success of the Oracle pilot project, in addition to OCI’s greater security, performance, and availability with low latency, tipped the scales in OCI’s favor. Also, Oracle’s cost structure and pricing based on its bring-your-own-license program were more favorable than other providers’ options.

Another plus was the company’s familiarity with Oracle Database technology. Abans felt less risk in migrating to Oracle Enterprise Database Service on OCI. Oracle’s Security Experience Program was another benefit, which gave Abans better understanding of its security and more knowledge of OCI security capabilities.

Abans’ lift-and-shift cloud migration began with moving its custom end-to-end supply chain application to OCI. The company moved 80% of all the workloads to OCI hosted in Oracle data centers in India. For compliance reasons, the remaining 20% of workloads were co-located in Sri Lanka’s National Data Center.

With support from Oracle Technical Engineering and Enterprise Security team, Abans deployed OCI Vulnerability Scanning Service to perform an initial vulnerability assessment. The company was able to quickly identify and reduce the number of vulnerabilities. It now runs automated assessments daily. Oracle Cloud Guard helped strengthen the company’s security, including detecting misconfigured resources, insecure activity across tenants, and malicious threats. In addition, Oracle Data Safe allowed IT staff to manage day-to-day security and compliance database requirements from a single console. This helped to sharply reduce the risks of system outages and the potential for customer or company information to be compromised.

In addition, Abans eliminated many manual tasks associated with disaster recovery and backups, allowing IT staff to focus on higher-value activities. Development teams delivered applications, services, and updates faster. The time needed to generate reports dropped significantly. System uptime climbed to 99.9%, and IT employees attained their recovery time objective for minimizing downtime associated with any disruption.

Abans’ store managers provided positive feedback because OCI automatically scaled to peak demands at the end of each month. Consistent with the company’s entrepreneurial spirit, IT employees now experience less stress and help improve the quality of services they deliver to customers and internal clients.

Abans established an effective support team that included an Oracle technology cloud engineering team and resources from a local partner, Lexicon Tech. Lexicon has consistently provided expertise and advice at critical stages of the project and continues to deliver support. Oracle assisted Abans with OCI tools that help to substantially improve its security posture.