Handle Financial has built a payment network that empowers users to pay rent, utility bills, repay loans, buy tickets and to much more with cash, and consumers can make payments on their own schedule at more than 17,000 trusted locations including 7-Eleven and Family Dollar stores across the U.S.
A move to the cloud would make them nimbler; more agile.
Their cloud journey started on AWS theming Elastic Load Balancers. But scaling to such a large volume – they’re running 28 ELBs – became costly and they lost some technical capabilities that they depended on, such as being unable to theme static IPs, which means partners couldn’t white list them. Theming ELBs also forced them to sacrifice SSL client-server authentication. And they couldn’t manage ELBs individually.
Those limitations brought Handle Financial to A10 Networks. They had been an A10 Networks customer previously, and had experienced business advantages. This time round, they wanted to move to the cloud and eliminate the costs and resource constraints that come with managing and maintaining hardware.
The big decision – F5 or A10?
They examined competing solutions from A10 and F5 -- they chose A10 because they they’re able to get all of the features they needed, including SSL authentication, in a cost effective manner and in a shorter amount of time. Plus, A10 is known for its engineering agility and support, so they were confident they’d have a responsive and consultative partner.
Control and Harmony
They moved all workloads to A10 Lightning ADC and manage them with the new A10 Harmony Controller, which gives them centralised management and analytics for secure application services in any underlying infrastructure — from traditional on-premise environments to public, private and hybrid clouds.
The benefits were immediate.
The analytics delivered by A10 Harmony Controller are a huge advantage. The ability to see analytics on the front end and to have the granularity to look at data per-request is great. The analytics also help them with their retail partners as they typically have older IT systems and have trouble isolating problems on their end. The analytics capability helps them determine where problems occur, so they can work toward fixing them.
Meanwhile, having a SaaS-based controller has also been helpful. In their disaster recovery scenario, they run their production facility out of one location with a dozen app servers, software routers and VPN connections. In their other location, they replicated databases. If the need for disaster recovery occurs, they can spin up the app stack on the fly.
Fewer Headaches, Reduced Costs
Overall, with A10 and Harmony Controller, they’re able to reduce operational costs by at least one third, and decrease our number of weekly headaches as well.
And leveraging Harmony Controller and Lightning ADC will help them in the future as well. They recently acquired a bill payment app, which runs in Microsoft Azure. Harmony’s ability to bridge multiple clouds means it can support our AWS environment and this new Azure environment simultaneously. And they can add other clouds, along with traditional on-premise environments as they'll. That’s powerful.
