A credit to the industry: Partnering with illion for the long haul

illion securely stores and analyses the unique data of millions of individuals and commercial entities. Since its inception in Australia in 1887 (when it was formerly known as Dun & Bradstreet), illion has been renowned for its expertise in credit risk management. The agency’s unique data, software, analytics, and risk management solutions form an integral part of the region’s financial ecosystem.

With exemplary service and tailored data and analytic solutions offered to its clients, illion is leading the market, creating long-standing and close relationships and priding itself on the reliability and dependability of its products and services.

illion is looking for every opportunity to stay ahead in a very competitive landscape.

With an appetite to continually invest in product innovation, illion embarked in a significant digital transformation to ensure a seamless employee and customer experience and maintain that competitive advantage.

It became clear that migration to the public cloud was the next natural step. illion’s cloud innovation journey is built on developing strength, security and resilience throughout its operations, and supporting its clients with innovation based on reliable and flexible cloud technology.

For this reason, illion decided to transform its data systems and undergo a transition to the public cloud, so that it can provide faster and more reliable service to its customers with minimal disruptions, securing its spot in the market as a trusted leader.

Interactive has had a long-standing partnership with illion for over eight years, supporting the company through numerous infrastructural changes. Initially starting with hardware maintenance support, Interactive has evolved its support to best suit illion’s needs throughout its partnership.

In 2018, illion turned to Interactive to migrate its data centres to the private cloud. Interactive will now help upgrade illion’s infrastructure to adhere to its mission, placing its customers and staff at the forefront of all operations.

illion has chosen to partner with Interactive to assist with its migration to the public cloud, following the design of a technology roadmap for illion. This will modernise illion’s infrastructure and continue providing customers with best-in-class service.

The journey to cloud innovation operates across four pillars: building strength and security resilience, driving sustainable growth, leveraging the cloud for maximum value, and minimising impact to customers.

Building security resilience and strength

Modernising illion’s technical infrastructure is not the only focus for Interactive. With a passion for teaching as well as doing, Interactive is committed to working collaboratively with illion to upskill team members so they get the most out of their workplace technology. Interactive is a supportive partner working alongside the business rather than just a third-party service desk, delivering an industry-leading security offering.

Driving sustainable growth

Interactive’s engineers prioritise understanding illion’s unique needs and requirements. This means that Interactive has a deep understanding of illion’s daily operations and offers the best-fit solution within the changing business landscape.

Interactive has remained a trusted partner and changed scope to assist the company for nearly a decade and will continue to work closely with the illion team throughout this migration.

Leveraging the cloud

The cloud unlocks multiple benefits, including the ability to rapidly scale, recover data more quickly, roll out with a faster time to market and higher availability, and cover off all bases with robust security measures.

Minimising the impact of IT issues

On average, Interactive’s service desk answers calls within six seconds. Any time of the day or night, Interactive is there to support illion through all issues, with the ability to tailor its solutions to illion’s scale and size.

A measured approach

When embarking on a public cloud migration, adopting a measured risk mitigation approach involves carefully evaluating potential threats and vulnerabilities, implementing robust security measures, and ensuring seamless backup and disaster recovery strategies to minimise disruptions and safeguard data integrity throughout the transition process. Key tenet of the approach taken by illion include:

• An incremental approach, proceeding with due caution.

• Undertaking Proof of Concept’s at various stages of the cloud journey.

• A rigorous focus on availability and performance.

• Focus on lower risk platforms migrating first.  With timelines driven by customer and market needs.

• Full end to end regression testing including performance testing for each application.

• Ensuring APRA guidelines are followed and cloud governance frameworks are in place.

With unparalleled scalability and unlocked innovation through the cloud, illion is well positioned to offer higher availability to customers, better disaster recovery, and a powerful security posture.

“The public cloud migration will allow us to provide faster and higher quality service to our customers, with limited server and operating system downtimes. This infrastructural change will bring us one step closer to our goal of providing excellent service in times where technology is continuously changing”, said Jesse Dumoff – Chief Information Officer, at illion.

This work aligns with Interactive’s Hybrid Cloud proposition – a journey that customers often take, from private to hybrid, and ultimately to public cloud platforms. With more than 200 cloud certifications across its cloud team, Interactive has developed rigorous tools for every phase of cloud migration. This helps to reduce uncertainty and deliver cloud projects on budget, with fixed price migrations.

In addition, Interactive worked in accordance with best-practice guidelines for security and compliance, to help illion migrate with minimum risk.

Christopher Thomas, the account lead for illion at Interactive, shared his excitement about this partnership.

“For many enterprises, the migration to public cloud can be a maze of ongoing risks. We will be alongside illion during every step of their transformation, helping to ensure a smooth transition and alleviate unnecessary stressors,” he said.

The hybrid cloud solution provides six key benefits to illion.

1. Cloud provides unrivalled scalability. This means that illion rapidly scales up to meet the needs of clients that are processing large quantities of data quickly.

2. This is paired with faster time to market. The agility that this offers illion is what keeps the organisation ahead of the game, with improved dev-ops allowing an increase in deployment frequency.

3. Cloud also brings with it higher availability on more systems. Less constraints and less bottlenecks contribute to a greater ability to leverage the cloud’s benefits on multiple platforms.

4. The data migration to the public cloud provides illion with efficient and comprehensive disaster recovery capabilities. If something goes wrong, downtime is minimised.

5. The main benefit of this migration for illion is the ongoing investment in bureau modernisation that leads to continued market-leading technology strategies. Clients can be assured that there is a consistent approach to innovation unlocked by the power of the cloud. This reduces operational cost and improves customer service, allowing illion to uphold its commitment to keeping people at the heart of its processes, products and culture.

6. Finally, this is all wrapped up with a robust security posture that defends sensitive data from attack.