Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

A true story.

A financial and insurance group, one of the seven largest insurance groups in China, ranks among the top 500 in the world and is regarded by others as the absolute "big financier". The financial and insurance group has done two big things in recent years: the first thing is to get an Internet insurance license in 2015, start to engage in online insurance-related business, and begin to build its own private cloud to complete the distributed transformation of surrounding non-core businesses.

The second thing is that the volume of business has exploded, with the volume of insurance policies alone growing 62 times in 2016. By 2017, there was a bottleneck in the group's core business system, and great difficulties were encountered in both system capacity and scalability, and the high-cost all-in-one database machine finally made the "big financier" unwilling to bear it. as a result, the group began to move towards the cloud of its core business, transforming its core database, and realizing the migration of its core business to a distributed cloud architecture in the second half of 2017. Up to now, through the cloud architecture, the database capacity of the group has reached an astonishing more than 30 TB, and the business is stable and convenient to expand.

Just like the 2017-2019 comparison that is popular in moments recently, new changes have generally taken place in their business in recent years, including finance, energy, retail, manufacturing and other industries after the digital transformation has begun. This is followed by earth-shaking changes in the infrastructure layer, and examples similar to the financial and insurance group have begun to emerge in recent years. At the moment, the cloud in the core business is definitely not a joke, but a general trend that more and more enterprises are putting it into practice.

So, with the acceleration of enterprise digital transformation, what changes have taken place in the core demands of enterprise core business? Why do more and more core businesses of enterprises begin to abandon the model of "traditional minicomputer + traditional storage" or "database all-in-one" and turn to distributed cloud architecture?

First of all, the pursuit of reliability and stability of enterprise core business has not changed. Whether deployed in traditional architecture or distributed cloud architecture, enterprise core business attaches great importance to reliability and stability.

Secondly, the core business of the enterprise has higher and higher requirements for performance. with the acceleration of digital transformation, not only the degree of digitalization of the business has deepened, but also the complexity and scale of the business have undergone unprecedented changes. these factors promote the core business's continuous pursuit of high performance.

Third, with the deepening of digitalization, enterprises' tolerance for core business system interruptions is rapidly decreasing. Considering that they carry the most core business systems and business data, these are the cornerstones for the survival and development of enterprises. Therefore, under the trend of increasing scale and complexity of core business, enterprises also put forward higher requirements for the disaster tolerance of core business systems. It is necessary to be able to achieve business recovery in the shortest time in the event of a failure or disaster.

Finally, the core business has an unprecedented desire for infrastructure scalability, whether database or ERP's desire for capacity and performance is undergoing earth-shaking changes. Taking the first provincial power company in China to complete the cloud transformation of ERP business as an example, the reason why it migrates from ERP which has been running for five years in traditional small architecture and traditional storage to distributed cloud architecture is because core business systems such as ERP not only encounter the problems of expansion, operation and maintenance under the centralized architecture, but also bring the situation of high operation and maintenance costs.

It is precisely because the core demands of the core business have undergone great changes, making the traditional infrastructure began to be abandoned by more enterprises. As Qingyun QingCloud technology experts said, both "minicomputer + traditional storage" and "database all-in-one" are facing the challenge of insufficient scalability, and the ecology is too closed, so it is difficult to integrate well with new technologies such as distributed applications, big data, containers, AI and so on.

However, the transformation of enterprise core business to cloud is still a "task-heavy" project, which not only involves a series of challenges from the initial migration scheme design, system migration, late operation and maintenance and service, but also requires the assistance of capable partners and suppliers. Take distributed storage, which is very important in distributed cloud architecture, as an example, there are a large number of companies in the market, and their products are varied and uneven, that is, there are open source-based products and many self-developed products. to a large extent, it brings great difficulties to enterprises in their choice.

For this reason, technical experts with rich practical experience in the transformation of enterprise core business to cloud believe that at present, the transformation of enterprise core business to cloud needs to pay attention to the following three aspects:

First, core business is often the lifeblood of enterprise development. Therefore, in the process of transition to the cloud, migration requires the selection of professional, rigorous, experienced partners. A technical expert revealed that the migration of Oracle databases will involve service capabilities at the platform level, and it is necessary to have relevant Oracle data experts to complete some particularly complex migrations.

The second is that the migrated suppliers or partners need to have end-to-end capabilities in the design, consultation, service, operation and maintenance of the migration solution. For example, when some experienced suppliers migrate the core database, they will first set up a sandbox environment to verify the matching with the relevant basic software, and then set up a test environment and copy the production environment data in real time for testing. finally, it is to really cut the business into the production environment. The supplier's comprehensive end-to-end capabilities can ensure that every step before and after the migration is foolproof and minimizes the risk.

Third, the distributed storage products of suppliers or partners must be hard-core enough. As we all know, distributed storage has made great progress in recent years, but it is only in recent years that core business systems are running on distributed storage. Many distributed storage products are still difficult to adapt to a variety of heavy-loaded database services. Once the volume of business expands, its performance, latency and other aspects will decline greatly. Therefore, a distributed storage product with excellent, market-tested and rich experience in business scenarios will be the key to the cloud migration of enterprise core business.

Among the many cloud vendors, Qingyun QingCloud is a company with rich experience and practice in the cloud transformation of enterprise core business. It has more than 7 years of technology accumulation and customer practice in distributed storage products, has a sound, professional and strong core business migration team, and has close cooperation with senior domestic migration consulting companies. It can provide professional and strong guarantee for the cloud transformation of the core business of the enterprise.

Recently, Qingyun QingCloud launched the "White Paper on Cloud Transformation of Enterprise Core Business Database". The white paper comprehensively analyzes the cloud transformation of core business from the perspectives of traditional architecture challenges of core business, cloud solutions based on distributed storage, cloud cases of finance, power and other industries, and scene evaluation, which is of great reference value to the current transformation of enterprise core business to cloud.

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