The customer
Founded in 2007, Worldnet Payments has become a leading software provider for seamless omnichannel payments. If you are buying online or swiping your card in-store, the chances are that Worldnet technology is in the background to ensure the virtual money flows to where it needs to arrive.
To quote their website:
“Recent years have seen huge investment in the Unattended Retail sector, allowing it to come a long way from its roots in Vending and Laundromats.
“Traditional Unattended Retail has collided with POS systems to spawn a number of new sectors. Whether you think of it as Automated Retail, Intelligent Retail, Unattended Retail, or Autonomous Check-out, the benefits are obvious, from increased customer satisfaction and spend, to reduced operational costs.”
Over 400 retail transactions are processed every second during peak traffic thanks to their technology.”
The challenge
The card payment industry has escalated over the last ten years and Worldnet has grown with it. Now a fully verified Europay, MasterCard, and Visa (EMV) provider - with more than 20 certifications in the US and Europe. Over 400 retail transactions are processed every second during peak traffic thanks to their technology.
Two examples of payment processors in the US that now rely on Worldnet technology include Bluefin Payments and CDE.
However, with growth comes the IT challenge and the company took the decision to move its on-premise operational estate into the Cloud to achieve greater scalability.
But, the Cloud provider that Worldnet chose was not the right destination. It soon became clear they were expensive and their QA environment (to test new applications and infrastructure in development) did not meet their needs. Time for another move, and that’s when Worldnet called upon Claranet for help.
Worldnet had already decided which cloud environment would be better suited for their infrastructure, but needed our support to achieve a smooth migration in rapid order (and with minimal disruption to their services).
Since Velostrata were bought by Google in 2018, their principal migration tool - now renamed Migrate for Anthos - has been on our radar to improve our service for our customers. It was the obvious choice for Worldnet.”
Director of Hybrid Cloud Services, Claranet
The solution
Google.
As a Cloud agnostic provider, Claranet engages in every migration project with an impartial view about which platform is right for their customer’s workloads and applications. In this case, Worldnet had already made their decision to move to Google and the Claranet team could see the benefits.
The next step was to guarantee a fast and reliable migration plan, our Cloud specialists chose Migrate for Anthos as the way forward.
The technical detail
Migrate for Anthos is all about decoupling compute from storage and adapting workloads on the fly for execution in GCP. The result is that they start running almost immediately, while the cold data migration takes place transparently in the background without any performance degradation.
Prior to migration, Migrate for Anthos also allows our engineers to test the GCP readiness of VMs in the existing hosting environment without making any changes or interrupting their operation. The ability to roll back and send the migration back to the provider offers additional peace of mind.
With our migration to GCP now complete, our future business growth is not limited by our IT anymore.”
CTO, World Payments
The result
Following Google’s prescribed process, we used Migrate for Anthos to migrate 36 VMs and 1.5 Terabytes of data in two weeks.
This included two stages:
Discovery (week one)
In the first week we gathered relevant information about the source servers to be migrated. This included creating the Google network landing zone, prescribing firewall rules for each environment project, installing the migration package for each instance, and setting up the Migrate for Anthos manager and configuration.
During this phase, the migration schedule for the sprint was also
established and communicated to the application team at Worldnet.
Migration and testing (week two)
During the migration week itself we moved the 36 VMs from Worldnet’s previous cloud provider into GCP. Because of Migrate for Anthos’s sophistication and automation, the migration was mostly transparent to the application, involving only a short (five to ten minute) downtime that was both upfront and easy to predict and schedule, with almost no operational work needed.
Then, post-migration we placed the migrated VMs and applications under observation for three days to trouble-shoot and respond to any user-reported incidents before regular operations were resumed.
Worldnet’s original servers were then decommissioned.
Worldnet has ambitious plans to become a leading provider of fully-hosted, “Payments as a Service” solutions, incorporating a range of pre-certified EMV® applications for POS, mPOS, mobile, tablet, and eCommerce payments.
With their IT infrastructure now migrated to GCP, the company has the scalability to go for growth in the unattended retail sector, a segment which the market insights firm, ResearchAndMarkets.com, projects will grow to $34 billion by 2023.