Vodafone Fiji gains scale, reliability, and ease of innovation by migrating its payment platform to Azure

Vodafone Fiji customers send and receive money and make purchases and payments through its M-PAiSA payment platform. Hoping to gain greater scale, resilience, innovation, and compliance, and to shed maintenance efforts and costs related to its aging hardware, the company migrated its on-premises platform to Microsoft Azure. With help from partner Onsys Technologies, Vodafone Fiji’s platform is now architected with a host of Azure infrastructure services. These have helped position the company to work more efficiently, easily scale for peak demand, and more easily develop and implement new features for continuous improvement.

Vodafone Fiji has been a trusted telecommunications, IT, and connectivity provider for Fijians for well over 20 years. The company has continuously supported its customers by consistently pivoting to meet Fijians’ ever-evolving needs with useful, innovative mobility and connectivity solutions.

It was in this spirit of supporting Fijians on the go that the company implemented M-PAiSA in 2010, a proprietary payment platform on which customers can send and receive money and make purchases and payments through one dependable application. And it’s in this same spirit that Vodafone Fiji recently sought to enhance the scale, performance, and features of M-PAiSA by migrating its workloads to Microsoft Azure.

“Spinning up services is a breeze on Azure, and project timelines have been significantly reduced as a result. Our latest development project took only two months where it used to take six.”

Deepak Baran, Head of Financial Technology, Vodafone Fiji

A better way to pay

When it initially launched, the M-PAiSA platform had around 40,000 to 50,000 monthly users. However, with the 2019 addition of its QR pay feature followed by abrupt shifts brought on by COVID-19, the platform experienced significant growth. Approximately 500,000 Fijians are active users today, and that number is rising as Vodafone Fiji expands to other islands. Customers use M-PAiSA to do vital activities like make in-store payments with the QR feature, pay bills, receive government payments, make online purchases through a partnership with Mastercard, and send and receive money to and from family and friends through cross-border transactions.

The platform historically ran on Vodafone Fiji’s telco network in its on-premises datacenter. But because the telco network wasn’t intended to support regulated banking workloads, the platform faced compliance issues when running some of the payment features supported by its Mastercard partnership. Additionally, Vodafone Fiji’s on-premises datacenter was fast approaching the need for a refresh, which would have amounted to a costly capital investment, and the company felt limited in its ability to develop and roll out new features with its hardware. To address these challenges and gain greater scale to meet increasing demand, Vodafone Fiji looked to Azure.

“After launching our QR pay feature, we noticed a big appetite in the market, and demand grew even more drastically after the pandemic by 400 to 500 percent,” recalls Deepak Baran, Head of Financial Technology at Vodafone Fiji. “By migrating to Azure, we hoped to better meet this demand and have the flexibility and resources to continuously enhance our services.”

A mindful migration

With such a critical platform for businesses and customers, Vodafone Fiji wanted to limit complexity and downtime in its cloud migration. So, it moved the platform’s applications to the cloud over three months, saving its database services for last in a planned outage of a few hours during a low-traffic period. The company worked with Onsys Technologies, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, who had previously been a partner for its on-premises environment and was able to bring expertise to the migration.

A future-leaning infrastructure

The company migrated its M-PAiSA platform to Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) running Windows Server. Its Azure implementation uses Azure App Service to deploy some of its applications, Azure ExpressRoute to connect its local environment, and Azure Front Door, Azure Application Gateway, and Azure load balancing to manage traffic, balance loads, and redirect services to another region in the event of failure. Altogether, the company deploys a three-node cluster plus an additional node for Azure backup and disaster recovery. Because the platform handles financial workloads, the company has full redundancy in place via the Azure Australia Southeast region.

Vodafone Fiji uses Azure Firewall to help secure the connections it has to its on-premises systems and Azure Web Application Firewall to safeguard internet-based traffic. Additionally, it draws on Azure DDoS Protection and Microsoft Sentinel to help secure its environment and the Application Insights feature of Azure Monitor to ensure that all sign-ins and transactions are transparently available for compliance requirements. To help simplify compliance for its regulated financial workloads, the company uses the PCI DSS Azure blueprint. “As a financial service provider, we use the PCI DSS Azure blueprint heavily because it helps simplify and ensure that we stay compliant,” says Bhawick Ghutla, Solutions Architect at Vodafone Fiji. “We’ve also included ISO 27001 in the blueprint to help keep us compliant.”

Finally, the company is using Azure Blob Storage to help support its storage requirements, and all of its VMs are running on Windows Server on Azure Virtual Machines. “One of the benefits of running on Windows Server is that certificate installation is an easy, fully managed process that only takes a few minutes to complete,” says Ghutla. Vodafone Fiji is pleased to have a single, holistic cloud infrastructure to support its platform. “Azure SQL Managed Instance has really taken the time, resources, and costs of maintenance off of our plate,” says Baran.

Efficiency, scale, and innovation

Since its migration, Vodafone Fiji has realized many benefits of leaving its datacenter behind. “We no longer need to babysit hardware and worry about things like air conditioning,” states Baran. “Migrating our workloads to Azure has significantly reduced our infrastructure resource expenditure.” Moving to the cloud has also helped the company scale back on skill sets it used to contract out for on-premises asset management.

The company is also now able to add scale with ease. If it needs to conduct a real-time replication or is expecting higher traffic because of a large government disbursement, it can quickly add resources to manage high traffic. “Scaling up was a huge challenge in our on-premises environment, but it’s only a matter of a few clicks since our migration to Azure,” says Baran. “It’s amazing!”

Through its migration to the cloud, Vodafone Fiji is now able to operate more efficiently. The company is bringing new features into its M-PAiSA platform, like modernizing its Know Your Customer application. Projects like this would have been lengthy with on-premises resources, but development cycles happen far more quickly with Azure. “Spinning up services is a breeze on Azure, and project timelines have been significantly reduced as a result,” says Baran. “Our latest development project took only two months where it used to take six.” Adds Ghutla, “We don’t want to reinvent the wheel with every development, so the out-of-the-box features that come with Azure really reduce development times.”

With that kind of flexibility, Vodafone Fiji can’t help but be excited about future innovations and service enhancements. “We’re way more agile now, and most importantly, we have the flexibility and resources to meet demand today and in the future,” concludes Baran. “As a business, we have a strategic roadmap in place, and the capabilities we have with Azure are helping us meet those goals.”

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