IBILE MFB Case Study

In the financial sector, building secure, scalable, and resilient infrastructure is crucial. Financial institutions are tasked with protecting sensitive data, ensuring regulatory compliance, and delivering a seamless experience to customers. As the industry increasingly adopts cloud-based solutions, selecting the right infrastructure becomes vital for optimizing performance, controlling costs, and supporting long-term growth.

Overview

IBILE Microfinance Bank (MFB) is a financial institution dedicated to providing accessible financial solutions to individuals and businesses. With a mission to empower communities and boost economic development, IBILE MFB focuses on delivering efficient banking services tailored to its clients' unique needs.

As the bank expanded, its operations and customer base grew, creating a demand for more robust, scalable, and secure IT infrastructure. Recognizing the need to upgrade its cloud infrastructure, IBILE MFB partnered with CloudPlexo, a trusted AWS partner, to enhance performance, scalability, and cost savings.

Quote from IBILE

CloudPlexo helps you with setting up your cloud infrastructure in the right way to minimize cost without reducing efficiency of your apps

Michael Onyike, Head of Information Technology

Challenges

IBILE MFB faced several key challenges in its existing cloud infrastructure:

• Outdated EC2 Instances: The bank’s infrastructure was hampered by outdated instance types, affecting performance and cost-efficiency.
• Co-location of Application and Database: Both the application and database were hosted on a single server, causing resource competition, limiting scalability, and increasing downtime risk.
• Underutilization of Resources: Instances were often underutilized, leading to unnecessary expenses and highlighting the need for better resource monitoring.

Solutions

CloudPlexo worked closely with IBILE MFB to implement the following solutions:

• Upgrade Cloud Infrastructure: The infrastructure was upgraded to improve performance and cost efficiency.
• Separate Application and Database: The application and database were separated to improve scalability, performance, and reduce risks associated with co-location.
• Re-Architect Infrastructure for Scalability and High Availability: The infrastructure was re-architected to prioritize scalability and availability. This included implementing load balancers, auto-scaling groups, and adopting managed database services like Amazon RDS for better fault tolerance and availability.
• Optimize Cloud Costs through Regular Reviews: Cloud resource utilization was regularly reviewed to ensure resources were right-sized and only necessary resources were used.
• Implement AWS Cost Optimization Tools: Tools like AWS Cost Optimizer were activated to receive recommendations on appropriate instance types based on actual workload requirements, optimizing both costs and resource allocation.

Results

By implementing these solutions, IBILE MFB achieved enhanced performance, greater scalability, and significant cost savings in its AWS environment, ensuring that its infrastructure could support long-term growth while meeting the bank’s evolving needs.