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Financial Services

3 minutes

How Brokers Ireland modernized a web application in the cloud

Client

Brokers Ireland Network Services Ltd

Sector

Private Sector

Technology

Microsoft Azure

The Challenge

Brokers Ireland Network Services Ltd is Ireland’s largest mortgage packager and facilitates the independence of mortgage brokers by giving them access to almost all lenders in the market. Brokers Ireland Network Services Ltd is part of Brokers Ireland, whose mission is to promote, support, and protect insurance and financial brokers. To enable this, the Brokers Ireland Mortgage Services application platform gives its members a user-friendly place to submit applications, compare mortgage rates, download all lender documents, and calculate what consumers can borrow.

For maximum efficiency to its members there is also a communication center where they can liaise with other members on each individual case while automatically logging the information on file. Internally, Brokers Ireland use the diary function to set tasks for each case. Brokers Ireland were faced with the challenge of migrating this critical business application to the Cloud and engaged Ergo to help collaborate on the roadmap and cloud journey.

Their core objective was to successfully move the platform provided to the member base to the Cloud so they could avail of new technology, increased security features and reduce the maintenance and management required, allowing them to focus on core business activities with their members. Their previous platform was running on an on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server environment nearing end of life and this presented a great opportunity for Brokers Ireland to modernize the application while enjoying the benefits of migrating to Azure.

The Solution

The first part of the engagement was to carry out a discovery phase both from a technical perspective and with the needs of the business at the forefront of the solution. This was a good opportunity to ensure the solution delivered the business value it should. The driver behind this engagement was to move an on-premise solution that required IT management overhead and move to a cloud solution where this was then taken care of by the Microsoft Azure platform, managed by Ergo. Here, the full benefits of the cloud can be realized. Patching and many other maintenance tasks were applied automatically by the platform. Meanwhile IT management still had the freedom to decide when to apply them.

Ergo’s cloud consultants designed an architecture based on a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution which removed the tasks of managing and maintaining the environment. The next stage was to carry out a proof of value concept by moving the solution to the Cloud as a demonstration that the fundamentals of the solution worked. This proved successful and the team and Brokers Ireland Network Services proceeded to carry out updates on the solution, deploy to the relevant environments for testing and ultimately completed the transformation from on-premise to the Cloud in a short period of time.

The new solution is a fully transformed application that now resides on Microsoft Azure as a PaaS solution. The codebase is fully refactored and based on the latest .Net version. It is using the latest technology and security features that Azure has to offer. It has been streamlined to remove any redundant elements in the solution. “Ergo has given us predictability and control over costs and we now have the flexibility to scale up or down as required”, explained Kimberley Hyland, Mortgage Manager at Brokers Ireland Network Services.

The benefits experienced by Brokers Ireland Network Services are as follows:
  • Peace of mind that the critical business application has moved from legacy to modern technology
  • Predictability of costs
  • Better business insights to the platform usage through Application Insights
  • Easier to support from an IT perspective
  • Easier to scale as on cloud platform

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