Modernising Integration
UTILITIES
Summary
Chamonix partnered with our customer, a leading Australian energy infrastructure business, to establish new integration practice standards enabling greater agile development and improved management of their overall integration landscape. Through our work, the organisation was able to scale environments quickly and autonomously through DevOps practices which enabled multiple large-scale programs to develop in parallel whilst minimising contention over common services.
The overall engagement also led to increased security and overall operational efficiencies.
Key Challenges
- Multiple significant transformational projects occur in parallel
- Critical dependency on new business systems having access to and contributing to organisational information in real or near real time
- Integrations facilitate core business activities in real time, including regulatory compliance. Projects cannot impact production workloads.
Considerations:
- The rate of business change required streamlined processes
- Changes to security boundaries with multiple cloud-based business systems
- Standard approaches to development and testing environments can causing conflicts and delays between projects
- As a critical infrastructure utility, the organisation falls under the Governments new Critical Infrastructure legislation, whereby strict new cyber security obligations are legally imposed
- Given the importance of the organisation in the market and their impact across a wide stakeholder group, business continuity and guaranteed delivery of critical information is a constant priority for the organisation.
Background
Chamonix has been servicing our customer on their integration needs for over a decade. As the organisation continues to grow both organically and through acquisitions, the landscape of their business systems has continued to grow and increase in complexity. The need for accurate, transparent, and immediate information sharing between business functions, partners and the market operator has continuously increased. Additionally, regulatory obligations and delivery of energy supplies to the market has become more reliant on information moving quickly and efficiently between their business systems.
Over the term of our partnership, we have built, monitored, managed and maintained several hundred integrations with between 8 and 10 million transactions each month.
Serviced Systems Include:
- Market
- Works Management
- Asset Management
- Logistics
- Geographic Information System
- Finance
- Human Resources
- Reporting
- Enterprise Resource Planning
Through our outsourced managed service, Chamonix helps to ensure the ongoing on-going operation of the environment. This is achieved by working closely with our customer and their stakeholders to ensure any changes to the integration environment are carefully planned and follow clearly defined standards to ensure a high quality of service is maintained.
The Solution
Chamonix worked with our customer to establish a new standard for their integration practices to enable:
Automation
- Enabling repeatability and removing dependence on individuals
- Empowering individual projects to stand up and manage their own environments
Modularisation
- Removing the impact and dependence between integrations and on the underlying infrastructure
- Reducing the impact of change and the scope of regression testing
- Establishing isolated environments preventing new integrations from being able to adversely impact the broader environment.
Increase Security
- Removing traffic from the public internet through the introduction of private end points
- Incorporating security practices and testing into the daily routine with DevSecOps practices
- Modularisation and containerisation prevent integrations from being able to impact or share context with other integrations. Reducing the attack surface and impact as part of defence in depth strategies.
These outcomes were achieved through three key pillars:
- Architecting a new secure and resilient Integration platform
- Establishing best practice standards for Azure Integration
- Introducing and cultivating Everything as Code DevOps practices
Architecting a new secure and resilient Integration platform
In architecting the new integration platform, we established modern cloud native architecture practices and developed a highly available resilient design incorporating multi-region architecture with hybrid connectivity to existing on-premises. Infrastructure as Code allowed for the separation of concerns as well as the ability for environments to be spun up and torn down on demand based on business and/or project requirements. This resulted in the ability to directly attribute ownership of Opex costs to the relevant business unit. Utilising a modular infrastructure and Integration as Code approach allowed for independent configuration updates and feature changes, providing the organisation with a zero-downtime deployment framework for uninterrupted 24/7 operation.
Establishing new integration best practice patterns and standards for the Azure platform was a key foundational layer of the organisation’s future roadmap, reducing reliance upon on-premise legacy systems, reducing costs and opening up access to broader market support. The recommended best practice standards included a cloud-native approach with hybrid on-premise connectivity laying the groundwork for the organisation’s gradual migration of legacy systems to the cloud. Utilising a Zero Trust approach and best practice offered the highest levels of security and confidence for the business to operate in a private/hybrid cloud.
Establishing best practice standards for Azure Integration
- Secure private/hybrid cloud integration environments built with Zero Trust principles
- Additional resilience through containerisations and protection of individual workloads
- Access to low code solutions providing additional efficiencies when implementing and maintaining integrations
- Access to broader support capabilities both through Chamonix and the broader market with the introduction of modern and more common tooling
- Substantial reduction in on-premise hardware and service requirements.
The introduction of configuration-based integrations and consolidated configuration management for code and cloud-native components served to provide greater efficiencies. Implementing the private/hybrid cloud architecture offered enhanced security including the ability for transactions to remain off the public internet when traversing between cloud, on-premise and third-party end points.
Introducing and cultivating Everything as Code DevOps practices
We introduced DevOps practices and established Continuous Integration (CI) through new AIS integrations, embedded quality assurance through automated testing and established Continuous Deployment (CD) standards incorporated through new Architecture. This significantly reduced the reliance on specifically skilled individuals and removed the dependence on key personnel on go-live day. Automated deployments and validation processes ensure production deployments are a well-established, trusted and repeatable process that takes less time and has a far smaller chance of requiring a rollback or causing unexpected issues in production. This practice will now serve as a solid foundation to maintain and enforce a strong cyber security posture through DevSecOps.
Solutions & Services
- Project Services
- Integration
- Azure Integration Services
- Azure DevOps
- Cloud Infrastructure
- Patterns & Standards
- Managed Integration Services
