Terra Becomes a World-Class SaaS Supplier with Huawei Cloud

About Terra Analytics

  • Terra Analytics is a diversified group of companies that focus on innovation in decision making by aggregating and visualizing data using spatial technologies with multidisciplinary capabilities. The group has over two decades of experience in delivering turnkey solutions to assist clients in both public and private sectors to make data-driven decisions, which support their unique management requirements.

    Terra Analytics is a diversified group of companies that focus on innovation in decision making by aggregating and visualizing data using spatial technologies with multidisciplinary capabilities. The group has over two decades of experience in delivering turnkey solutions to assist clients in both public and private sectors to make data-driven decisions, which support their unique management requirements.

Challenges

  • Terra Analytics used to manage its IT infrastructures in local hosting data centers and on-premise environments. However, due to aged equipment and frequent load shedding, the risk of service interruption caused by hardware failures and power failures increased significantly. Resources in the existing environment were insufficient to meet Terra's future expansion needs. To guarantee business continuity, user experience, and the security of Internet-facing application services, Terra needed newer technologies to provision a comprehensive solution catering for full disaster recovery and failover services without an over reliance on limited and skilled in-house specialists or physical infrastructure.

    Terra Analytics used to manage its IT infrastructures in local hosting data centers and on-premise environments. However, due to aged equipment and frequent load shedding, the risk of service interruption caused by hardware failures and power failures increased significantly. Resources in the existing environment were insufficient to meet Terra's future expansion needs. To guarantee business continuity, user experience, and the security of Internet-facing application services, Terra needed newer technologies to provision a comprehensive solution catering for full disaster recovery and failover services without an over reliance on limited and skilled in-house specialists or physical infrastructure.

Pain Points

  • Weak infrastructure

    Aged hardware in hosting and self-built server rooms, together with frequent load shedding in South Africa hindered SLA fulfillment.

    Aged hardware in hosting and self-built server rooms, together with frequent load shedding in South Africa hindered SLA fulfillment.

  • Lack of IT specialists

    IT engineers were mostly engaged in project delivery and application configuration and optimization, which limited the capacity available for IT hardware environment troubleshooting.

    IT engineers were mostly engaged in project delivery and application configuration and optimization, which limited the capacity available for IT hardware environment troubleshooting.

  • Lack of a monitoring portal and low resource utilization

    Terra could not check resource statistics in its traditional virtualization environment. Its CPU utilization was lower than 15%.

    Terra could not check resource statistics in its traditional virtualization environment. Its CPU utilization was lower than 15%.

Solution

Terra Analytics has made the decision to move all its applications to Huawei Cloud to enjoy the benefits of cloud technologies.

Terra Analytics has made the decision to move all its applications to Huawei Cloud to enjoy the benefits of cloud technologies.

Huawei Cloud provided a reliable, scalable, and on-demand environment with backup capacity and a real-time monitoring console. The solution provisioned Elastic Cloud Server (ECS), Elastic IP (EIP), Cloud Backup and Recovery (CBR), and Cloud Eye (CES). The Huawei Cloud Server Migration Service (SMS) helped Terra automatically migrate on-premises VMs and physical servers to the cloud and switch over services to cloud within 2 minutes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Huawei Cloud helped Terra ensure business continuity, provide agile businesses accessible anytime, anywhere, and tackle infrastructure and security challenges.

Benefits

Huawei Cloud team worked with the Terra Analytics technical team to understand Terra's legacy IT architecture and tailor a cloud solution. After several workshops with the Huawei Cloud team, Terra received a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective cloud solution. Terra can easily migrate legacy applications to Huawei Cloud, without the traditional concerns related to computer setup, storage, and network infrastructures; and can scale resources anytime as required. With Huawei Cloud SMS, Terra can migrate the legacy applications to the proposed cloud platform seamlessly, commencing the cloud journey of becoming a world-class SaaS vendor. Now applications are running steadily on the cloud, saving significant time and effort for the engineering teams and freeing up capacity for application configuration and optimization in existing and new projects. On Huawei Cloud CES, Terra can check real-time and historical CPU, memory, and storage utilization statistics, and optimize and consolidate its cloud specifications accordingly, reducing at least 30% costs.