Client Background
Care Friends are revolutionising the social care sector by enabling care providers to hire and retain high-performing workers with their hugely popular mobile app and web based back-end.
Their innovative employee led referrals approach has increased employee engagement, reduced interview no-show rates from 50% to under 10%, and slashed the amount care providers pay for internet job boards.
Problem
Care Friends were expanding their global footprint. As part of a move into Australia, they needed to address the problem of their now struggling infrastructure.
Their existing web application was monolithic, sitting in an on-prem data centre and hosted on a single virtual machine. The team had a growing list of concerns over its architecture as it was experiencing issues with reliability, speed, memory and bandwidth.
As the expansion to Australia was nearing concerns were multiplying;
- How can we maintain performance while serving two different continents?
- How can we ensure data sovereignty for our Australian customers? (Australian data needs to reside in Australia and cannot be combined with existing data in the UK)
Solution
Care Friends approached Dootrix, we completed an initial Cloud Migration Application Assessment to analyse the existing application’s architecture and associated infrastructure. This assessment allowed us to propose a migration path to a new, scalable, architecture built on cloud-native services.
The proposals included moving the core web application to Azure App Service, making use of zone redundant storage, and allowing for horizontal scaling of the application. The database would be migrated to a hyper-scale database service, leveraging automatic backups and high availability DTUs. Azure’s SLA guarantee of 99.99% up-time and infrastructure templates would allow for the rapid deployment of a dedicated sovereign data store in Microsoft’s Australian data centres.
Care Friends embraced the modernisation plan with Dootrix migrating the infrastructure from virtual machines to a cloud-native approach using Microsoft Azure.
