Infosys Saves Costs by Hosting Website on Public Cloud

With US$8.25 B in annual revenues and 165,000+ employees, software giant Infosys enable clients in more than 50 countries.
With explosion of mobile, tablet and phablet users, it became inevitable for Infosys to redesign the website as an adaptive and responsive website. The company was facing multiple practical challenges with the old model resulting in high TCO overall.

Challenges faced
The architecture of old site supported authoring across locations but had a complicated multi-step process for publishing that was error prone and hence required dependence on a central team based out of India. The corporate website was running on older version of content management solution (CMS) viz. SharePoint 2007 and was hosted on-premise out of two data centers in East and West US. Both software and the underlying hardware were near their end of life support and needed a complete reengineering.

The Implementation
The new www.infosys.com is running on the upddated version of content management solution i.e. Sharepoint 2013 and the infrastructure is hosted on Microsoft Azure Cloud platform in US and Europe datacenters, addressed as primary and secondary setup. Akamai plays the dual role of (content Delivery Network) CDN provider, with  160,000+ caching servers spread across the globe to ensure that users can access pages faster, as well as the global traffic manager which automatically fails over the traffic from primary to secondary site in the adverse event of any disaster.
One of the key requirements to implement was a need of automated functional website hosted across geo-diverse locations. There was no prior evidence of such a deployment on Sharepoint. The company partnered with Microsoft and Akamai for deploying geo-redundant solution on Sharepoint and MS Azure. The company claims that this is globally the first geo-redundant solution built on Sharepoint 2013 hosted on MS Azure cloud platform across the globe with availability across the datacenters.

Project Head, Ganesh Gopalakrishnan
Senior Vice President, Infosys Limited

The Result
The new website provides better user experience across different device like desktop, tablets and mobile with performance improvement of 60%.  With the new cloud hosting, new servers (virtual machines) can be spawned out in couple of minutes, resulting in remarkable time savings. Just to illustrate, during the course of the project, the infrastructure team setup more than 100 servers in less than 5 days which can be attributed to physical servers.
Now, the company can create a fully working data center in any geo location in less than a day in future Also, with cloud hosting, the cost of VMs is expected to come down over the period due to competitive pricing between could hosting vendors. In case of on-premise hosting the upfront cost is a sunk cost. Infosys has marked more than 25% reduction in the VM costing in last 1 year. It also avoided upfront investment of around a million and a half USD and managed portal launch on cloud hosting with 50K USD.