The choice to operate on a private cloud or public cloud is far from binary, with financial services illion expecting to spend much of the rest of this decade in an interim hybrid cloud state as it progressively rebuilds most of its core services during its cloud transformation.
illion one of Australia’s leading consumer and commercial credit bureaus specialises in high volume data analysis and decision support – had long been hosting its entire infrastructure from a private data centre environment.
However, given the increased pressure on its infrastructure for fast turnaround – services like its illion Transaction Risk Score (iTRS) are used, for example, by buy now pay later (BNPL) operators to evaluate and approve credit requests made by customers while standing at a store register – that infrastructure was starting to encounter challenges in keeping up.
With demand for iTRS exceeding 100,000 credit applications per year – and other core analytics services seeing similar growth in demand as the likes of Bluescope, Savvy, Bank Australia, and Fair Go Finance tap its credit scoring and risk management services – illion set out on a cloud transformation to improve its resilience and scalability during times of peak demand.
“Whether in today’s fast-paced retail environment or supporting new online businesses that require fast credit scoring and approval, our reputation hinges on our ability to provide robust data-driven services that help our clients evaluate risk,” said Peter Griffiths, head of cloud technology platforms with illion.
“In a time of surging demand for our services, it was clear that maintaining this capability would be easier and more cost-effective if we transitioned to a scalable, robust cloud solution.”
Prioritising the migration
Having previously worked with solutions provider Interactive to develop its private cloud environment, illion engaged the company to plot out a strategy that would ultimately see it moving 75 per cent of its systems to public cloud environments by 2026.
Achieving that goal necessarily involves years of operation in a transitional hybrid cloud state – in which illion, develops and maintains a broad range of bespoke core applications, along with managing both newly refactored cloud-based applications, and legacy applications running in the previous private cloud environment.
Given the tight interconnections between application components, maintaining the business while these infrastructure components are re-engineered required careful planning and prioritisation to ensure the business continued to operate smoothly throughout the transition.
“Applications present to customers at the top level, but underneath it’s actually micro applications that do 40 different things and then feed up to the customer interface,” explained Christopher Thomas, account executive for cloud and managed services with Interactive.
Although possible to have moved illion’s systems to the cloud faster, Thomas said, a straight ‘lift and shift’ migration to the cloud was never really considered because illion saw the transition to cloud as a crucial opportunity to modernise its infrastructure and reposition its business to meet customer demand.
“It’s highly complex to take all that and just move it,” Thomas said, “so we have partnered with illion focus on modernising each component as they go.”
To manage the progressive rollout, illion created a ‘landing zone’ into which each app would be conceptually placed, providing a tiered system by which each application can be evaluated, ranked, and queued for migration to the cloud environment.
“Modern, customer-facing applications have been prioritised to realise the full potential of the public cloud sooner,” Thomas said, “with each application meticulously crafted with a customer-first approach, considering multiple components and interdependencies that are carefully mapped and rebuilt.”
Hybrid forever
The move to cloud has become a business imperative for most companies, with Gartner recently predicting that cloud will have evolved from being a technology disruptor to becoming a “business necessity” by 2028 – with over 70% of enterprises using industry cloud platforms to accelerate their transformation by 2027.
Under the current migration plan, Interactive and illion will have moved around two-thirds of illion’s applications and servers to the public cloud within the next three years.
At that point, Thomas said, illion will still have to evaluate a sizeable number of systems and decide whether they should be refactored into cloud-native applications, or simply migrated to cloud as-is.
But until then, illion will be operating in a hybrid cloud state that requires careful attention not only to technical continuity, but to business issues such as minimising the risk of double spending – a risk that is inherent in hybrid environments where old and new infrastructure necessarily coexist.
“While our long-term vision is to take advantage of cloud platforms and all the capabilities they provide,” said Peter Griffiths, head of cloud technology platforms with illion “in the near term our deliberate, staged approach to the migration will help us maintain service using a hybrid cloud environment, ensuring that our customers can progressively benefit from new cloud capabilities as they become available.”
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