Group Lease Selects Sangfor HCI to Enhance IT Capabilities and Achieve Excellence in Digital Finance
About Group Lease Public Company Limited
Group Lease Public Company Limited (GL) is a finance company based in Thailand that specializes in leasing and hire-purchase services. Founded in 1986, GL offers financial solutions mainly for motorcycles and agricultural machinery, helping individuals and businesses acquire essential equipment. Listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) under the ticker symbol "GL," the company operates through an extensive network across Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Indonesia.
GL has over 1,000 employees and maintains hundreds of service points to cater to its growing customer base. The company’s mission is to provide accessible financing options to underserved markets, promoting economic growth and improving living standards.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/GroupleaseTH
IT Infrastructure
GL operates on a "digital finance platform" model that integrates IT networks, loan systems, and point-of-sale (POS) networks. It focuses on using advanced technology and developing proprietary e-finance software to deliver fast and accurate services. Additionally, it maintains robust IT security and data protection policies to ensure the safety and integrity of customer data.
Challenges
GL faced challenges with its traditional data center, which hosted over 90 virtual machines (VMs). Upgrading the infrastructure was necessary to handle increasing resource demands and to address cyber threats in the hypervisor environment. Sangfor and its partner, IT Green, provided consultation and planning for infrastructure redesign to support applications, virtualization management, security, and backup and disaster recovery systems.
Sangfor Solution for Group Lease
Sangfor HCI: GL initially implemented Sangfor HCI (Hyperconverged Infrastructure) to replace its previous HCI solution, offering a more attractive and cost-effective option. Sangfor HCI integrates compute, storage, and networking into a single platform, enhancing performance and reliability while simplifying resource management.
Sangfor Disaster Recovery: After a successful experience with Sangfor HCI, GL adopted Sangfor’s Disaster Recovery (DR) solution. This solution establishes a DR site using Sangfor’s in-country Managed Cloud Service (MCS). It uses the same HCI platform to host business systems and store replicated data.
Sangfor Endpoint Secure: The company also deployed Sangfor Endpoint Secure, a modern Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP), on Sangfor HCI. Endpoint Secure provides robust protection for VMs in the production and DR environments.
- Sangfor Cloud Platform (SCP): Monitor various system statuses, including the backup status for all sites and groups of protected VMs. Receive alerts on issues for quick resolution.
- Local Backup:
- VM Backup: Configure backup schedules for off-peak hours.
- File Access: View backed-up files without restoring the VM.
- Quick Restore: Quickly restore VMs from backup.
- Data Replication: Synchronize VM data to the destination according to the configured RPO (Recovery Point Objective) settings.
- Failover to DR Site: Quickly switch to backup VMs in the event of a disaster or during scheduled maintenance tests. Failback to Production Site: Restore VMs to the primary site by transferring only the differential data.
Solution Benefits
- Smooth Migration: The transition to Sangfor HCI was seamless thanks to the Sangfor Cloud Migration Tool (SCMT). The controlled data transfer rate of 300 Mbps ensured a stable and efficient migration process. A total of 45 virtual machines (VMs) were migrated from another hypervisor. This migration, managed by IT Green, moved approximately 15 VMs per week, with the process being accelerated by the customer.
- Simplified Management: The Sangfor Cloud Platform (SCP) streamlined management with a unified dashboard. It allows the IT team to manage all resources more efficiently and promptly alerts them to abnormal events for swift resolution. Moreover, Sangfor HCI’s virtualization capabilities facilitate effective VM creation, management, and monitoring.
- System Availability and Continuity: Sangfor HCI’s built-in backup solution with continuous data protection (CDP) provides essential backup protection without needing third-party solutions. DR provided through Sangfor MCS ensures compliance with business continuity management requirements. With a recovery time objective (RTO) of 4 hours and a recovery point objective (RPO) of 2 hours as per company requirements, it ensures minimal downtime and data loss during an outage.
- Cloud Adoption: Sangfor MCS’ in-country data center in Thailand simplified DR adoption and optimized resource investment. This setup enables further cloud service adoption, helping GL enhance flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness through a hybrid cloud architecture.
- Improved Security: Sangfor HCI includes advanced security features, including hypervisor-level protection, distributed firewall, and the aSEC cloud security center. GL also deployed Endpoint Secure, which uses AI-driven technologies to monitor VMs and detect security threats in real time.
- Other benefits included easy scalability, high performance, rapid data processing and access, automatic updates, reduced IT team workload, support from Sangfor Thailand, and efficient post-sales service.
Conclusion
Implementing Sangfor HCI has significantly enhanced Group Lease’s IT infrastructure, enabling smoother operations and improved performance. The transition was seamless thanks to Sangfor and IT Green’s tools and support. By integrating disaster recovery and endpoint protection solutions, GL now enjoys a secure and resilient environment. The move also facilitates further cloud adoption, promising greater flexibility and scalability. Overall, Sangfor has empowered GL to achieve excellence in digital finance, ensuring reliable and efficient service delivery to its customers.