LuLu Financial Group leverages Microsoft Azure cloud services to shore up customer service and product development

In its endeavor to offer seamless services to customers, the company built an all-in-one digital platform, LuLu Money. Over time, nearly 30 percent of its remittances started flowing through the platform. However, data residing on-premise servers made the development-to-deployment cycle lengthy and challenging to manage.

Increasing maintenance inflated its development costs. To continuously update the software and keep innovating, LuLu Financial group wanted to roll out updates once every 14 days. Realizing this goal was tough on many counts, some of which are:

• The deployment team had to continuously work beyond office hours to meet the roll-out
  schedule.
•  Given that one platform served customers across multiple time zones, there was a short
  one-and-a-half-hour window to completely shut down services, roll back the old version and
  launch a new one.
• In case the update was not successful, the rollback process was manual and time-consuming.
  The downtime meant that frontline teams and customers could not access the portal for
  hours.

Solution: To deliver scalability, reliability, security, and peak performance on the cloud, the company turned to Microsoft Azure DevOps. Leveraging various components of Azure DevOps, LuLu Financial group has cut down the database spin-up time from three weeks to 30 minutes and the development-to-deployment cycle up to 50 percent. To unlock the agility and scalability, it needed to innovate and thrive, the company embraced digital transformation on the cloud.

How it was achieved

The company went on to build an end-to-end solution framework to deploy containerized
microservices on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), using automation through Azure DevOps and
Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. It leveraged various services to envision its high-level
architecture

Benefits

Smarter planning, better collaboration, and faster shipping With a cloud-driven solution strung together on Azure DevOps, LuLu Financial Group has realized significant benefits for stakeholders across the value chain.

For developers, the changeover to the new platform has been quick and hassle-free. It is now easier to roll out updates and releases, without the need for large capital to manage the hosting infrastructure. Through fast integration of multiple services on one platform, the transformation has accelerated the time required to develop, test, and deploy business critical applications.

Ultimately, these benefits are being passed on to customers. With Azure DevOps as the foundation of its digital offerings, LuLu International Exchange is well-positioned to offer seamless digital experiences and upgrades at optimal costs, with the promise of high availability and security in its transactions.

LuLu Financial group plans to amplify its tech intensity further, intending to move its entire legacy infrastructure to Azure cloud over the next two years.