Reliable Infrastructure Hosting in Microsoft Cloud
Azure Hosting for WEBCON with Server Backups
Introduction
In the manufacturing industry, there is no room for errors. To keep production operational and efficient, a reliable infrastructure is the foundation of the business. When Woodmansterne reached out to Dolphin IT Solutions for a business process management solution that integrates with their production line systems, we assured them that WEBCON BPS was the right tool for the job, and that we would be able to host it in our cloud environment with no compromise on efficiency.
Challenges
In order to reduce the need for Woodmansterne to have an internal system architecture team, we would host the WEBCON server in our own environment, and maintain backups, system patching and availability.
As we manage the infrastructure, which is critical to Woodmansterne’s operations, we would also be responsible for disaster recovery, ensuring a quick restoration of the system in the event of a disaster.
Our Solution
We built Woodmansterne’s WEBCON solution in our own Azure tenant, separate from our data or other clients hosted in our tenant. To ensure the hosting is cost effective, we set up reservations on the cloud resources eligible for such discounts. Reservations in Azure, sometimes called Reserved Instances, allow you to commit to pay for resources for one or three years, helping Microsoft plan ahead for demands on their data centre. In return for this commitment, Microsoft Azure provides a generous discount on the cost of the reserved resources.
Once the WEBCON environment was configured, we ensured that backups were in place: we set up a SQL backup plan on the database server; taking a full backup nightly, and differential backups taken hourly during working hours.
We then set up our server backup solution, which takes a weekly snapshot of the whole server and its hard drives, as well as nightly differential snapshots, and stores them off-site.
Beyond infrastructure and backups, Azure Monitor is continually monitored to provide real-time insights on system health, performance, and areas of improvement, helping our infrastructure support team to plan ahead, ensuring proactive system maintenance and reducing the need for manual intervention.
