ServiceMax Seeks to Rearchitect its AWS Environment
With a need to implement a cloud automation solution to streamline digital processes and workflows, ServiceMax — a global leader in field service management software — was looking to re-architect, configure, and manage its field service management platform.
What was ServiceMax Looking to Achieve?
ServiceMax uses the AWS cloud platform to process work orders via its Software-as-a-Service solution. With more than 1 million work orders processed per month, and 300,000+ technicians working across the globe to manage 150+ million customer devices, their goal was to elevate cloud performance, security, and availability within the ServiceMax SaaS platform.
In addition, they sought to identify more suitable cloud-service candidates that align with business requirements on the AWS cloud.
Challenges for ServiceMax on the AWS Cloud
ServiceMax was seeking a partner to assist with building a highly resilient, scalable, and secure infrastructure on AWS, coupled with minimal downtime and data governance. The new platform needed to support script automation, as ServiceMax encountered manual processing errors that reduced productivity and data accuracy. ServiceMax was also threatened by recurring downtime on its network, requiring enhanced network performance through agile applications that could handle dynamic bandwidth needs and network topology changes.
To achieve these goals, Trianz experts completed an initial assessment of existing IT capabilities with ServiceMax to explore the possibilities of executing a time-bound, object-oriented, proof-of-concept-based deployment on AWS. After approval, Trianz experts reduced operational costs by identifying a low-cost solution on AWS that targeted high-bandwidth application environments.
Technology Components Used by ServiceMax on AWS
After consultation and implementation, the ServiceMax platform was underpinned by the following AWS components:
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for secure, private local area networks in the cloud
Amazon Route 53 for domain name server (DNS) routing and management within the AWS ecosystem
Amazon CloudFront for global edge-caching and edge-serving of media through a content delivery network (CDN)
Elastic Load Balancing for adaptive processing and resource allocation as platform demand rises and falls
Amazon EC2 (with AutoScaling) for fully automated, scalable compute nodes
AWS Lambda for serverless compute without provisioning or managing servers
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for low-cost cloud storage, archiving, and disaster recovery backups
Elastic Block Store (EBS) for storing and managing data in blocks within relational database management systems (RDBMS)
AWS Identity Access Management (IAM) to control user account access to sensitive datasets and software, along with two-factor authentication (2FA) support
Amazon GuardDuty to continuously monitor for AWS account or compute workload threats using heuristic threat scanning
Amazon Inspector to automate security and compliance assessments for business applications running on AWS
AWS Secrets Manager to store and govern access to secret hashes, salts, and passwords used when accessing sensitive applications, services, and IT resources
AWS WAF and Shield to monitor HTTP and HTTPS requests forwarded to Amazon services, acting as a web firewall
AWS CloudFormation to generate and manage Infrastructure-as-Code templates for AWS and third-party services
AWS CloudTrail to monitor governance, compliance, audits, and risk for specific AWS user accounts
AWS CloudWatch to collect and centralize application and infrastructure monitoring data for a 360-degree holistic cloud network overview
AWS Config to assess, audit, and evaluate AWS resource configurations
Trianz also implemented Sumologic, Qualys, OpenVPN, Wazuh, AVI, Bro & Suricata, HashiCorp Terraform, GitHub, Jenkins, Newrelic, and Jumpcloud to further enhance the platform with cloud-based automation, machine learning, and advanced security capabilities.
How the Trianz Approach Upgraded ServiceMax’s IT Infrastructure
The Trianz experts followed a roadmap to reinvent the ServiceMax IT infrastructure network and deliver on project objectives. It started with a complete redesign of the infrastructure environment, in alignment with AWS best practices using Infrastructure-as-a-Code.
Terraform modules were deployed across the new infrastructure environment to enable full scaling support. A hub-spoke architecture allowed for centralized connectivity between virtual networks (or spokes) acting as a central zone for ingress and egress traffic.
Trianz introduced ServiceMax IT personnel to security best practices, including boundary defense, CIS hardening, endpoint security, credential management, multi-factor authentication, monitoring, auditing, logging, certificate and key management, and vulnerability management.
A “blue-green” approach was used to gradually transition users to the latest web application version — it was implemented using Terraform and Jenkins continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.Finally, Jumpcloud was used for all eligible services as a single sign-on (SSO) solution.
How Trianz Helped ServiceMax Realize Their Business Goals
After successfully executing its re-architecture with Trianz, ServiceMax’s platform performance increased noticeably with improved efficiency and high availability, leading to less wasted spend and better customer experiences.
Application rollouts were streamlined, reducing workloads for IT developers through automation. ServiceMax can redeploy IT assets in record time thanks to Infrastructure-as-Code templates and Jenkins CI/CD pipelines. Operating costs for the ServiceMax SaaS platform were also greatly reduced, and service level agreements (SLAs) improved while meeting customer security requirements.
The Transformational Effects and Impact
Downtime was reduced by up to 80% due to the “blue-green” approach used with Terraform and Jenkins. The time to spin-up new applications PoPs was reduced from one month to one week. Security standards were greatly improved, enabling ServiceMax to pass internal and external audits with ease.
Finally, the IT department has reduced the number of false alarms on the IT network. Now, using advanced alert monitoring, threats are automatically remediated using common anomaly resolution playbooks.
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