L2–L3 Infrastructure Support for BPC
Summary
ScienceSoft provided L2–L3 infrastructure support for BPC, a fintech company delivering digital banking, payment, and ecommerce software products. BPC managed to cut IT support expenses by 10%+ while ensuring the fail-safe performance of its network and IT systems.
About Our Customer
BPC is a European software product company offering 40+ SaaS and on-premises fintech solutions for banks, payment service providers, ecommerce businesses, and financial regulators. Today, BPC’s products are used by more than 350 organizations in 120 countries, enabling straight-through processing of 30M+ transactions on a daily basis. Owing to its commitment to innovations and excellent client experience, BPC was featured in The 2024 Fintech Power 50 list of the world’s most influential fintech companies.
BPC’s activities are primarily focused on new fintech product development, managed product implementation, and client support. Therefore, it’s critical for BPC to have stably performing, highly available, and secure project management systems and development environments. BPC maintains an in-house ICT team that supports its business apps and IT infrastructures and provides an L1–L3 help desk for employees.
However, as BPC’s business scaled, the volume and complexity of ICT tasks grew steadily, posing new challenges for the company’s engineers. To quickly and cost-effectively ramp up its ICT team, BPC decided to outsource a range of infrastructure management and support tasks and sought out external L2–L3 support competencies. ScienceSoft came across as a reliable infrastructure services provider with 13 years of relevant experience and a good grasp of the fintech domain.
L2–L3 Technical Support and Consulting on Microsoft Environment Evolution
ScienceSoft assembled a team of full-time ICT support specialists, including network administrators, system administrators, SharePoint engineers, Microsoft engineers, and Atlassian engineers. Before the cooperation started, ScienceSoft’s team explored BPC’s IT management processes, support models and toolkit, and the associated IT infrastructure components. It helped our experts understand the common issues, proactively plan the response actions, and integrate into BPC’s collaboration flows quickly.
As requested by BPC, ScienceSoft’s engineers took the responsibility for the following directions:
Network management
Our team handles the full scope of network maintenance and support tasks across BPC’s geographically distributed locations:
- Configuring, managing, and updating Cisco networking devices and server hardware, WAPs, LANs, WANs, VPNs, routers, switches, security tools (firewalls, IAM, network security monitoring), and more.
- 24/7 monitoring of network performance (latency, response time, bandwidth utilization).
- Detecting, diagnosing, and resolving network issues.
- Network performance optimization via load balancing, traffic optimization, tuning network configurations, dynamic reallocation of bandwidth resources, and more.
L2–L3 help desk
ScienceSoft provides multi-tiered technical support for BPC employees and the company’s clients. The flow usually works as follows:
- When BPC’s L1 support team encounters previously undocumented network issues that require the involvement of technical specialists, they use Jira Service Desk to route the tickets to ScienceSoft’s L2 support team. The L2 team is also responsible for handling critical network-related issues, such as connectivity crashes or hardware failures.
- The L2 support team involves ScienceSoft’s L3 support engineers to solve highly intricate issues that require infrastructure reconfigurations or the deployment of new system components.
Consulting and support for Microsoft Project Server and SharePoint
SharePoint-hosted Microsoft Project Server is the heart of BPC’s cross-departmental collaboration on product development and customer project management. Since keeping Microsoft Project Server and SharePoint environments at top performance is crucial for BPC, the company engaged ScienceSoft for a comprehensive SharePoint health check. Having audited the system, our engineers introduced a plan of strategic improvements, which covered:
- Consolidating disparate SharePoint farms into a single farm to create a centralized infrastructure for project management and document management apps.
- Migrating from SharePoint Online to an on-premises deployment of SharePoint Server 2019 to establish full control over BPC’s data and infrastructure. This would ensure better protection of sensitive data and help optimize SharePoint TCO in the long run.
- Integrating Microsoft SharePoint and Project Server with single sign-on (SSO) mechanisms to streamline user authentication, enhance security, and simplify identity and access control.
- Developing automation rules (for task assignment, document distribution, notifications, etc.) within Microsoft Project Server and SharePoint and integrating Microsoft Project Server with BPC’s HR system to automate project resource allocation. This would help BPC remove redundant manual efforts and drive the efficiency of project management operations.
- Creating technical documentation for Microsoft Project Server and SharePoint systems to streamline their maintenance and evolution.
As of March 2024, the long-term system enhancement project is still ongoing, and ScienceSoft’s specialists cooperate closely with BPC’s IT team to implement the proposed steps.
As for regular SharePoint support and maintenance activities, ScienceSoft’s engineers participate in administering SharePoint and Microsoft Project Server and handling L2–L3 requests.
Microsoft systems support
ScienceSoft’s Microsoft-certified engineers handle the configuration, monitoring, administration, performance tuning, and incident management for BPC’s Microsoft systems and infrastructure components:
- Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) is used for centralized deployment, administration, and maintenance of BPC’s Microsoft apps.
- Microsoft Active Directory serves as the identity provider for SSO authentication. Our engineers are responsible for group policy object management (enforcing security settings, configurations, and policies for users and nodes within an Active Directory domain).
- Windows Server Update Services are used to manage the distribution of updates and patches for Microsoft products within BPC’s corporate network.
- Public Key Infrastructure is used to secure communications and authenticate users within BPC’s network infrastructure. ScienceSoft’s Microsoft experts also take part in rolling out PKI components for BPC’s banking clients.
Following BPC’s IT modernization strategy, our team also runs the gradual migration of Microsoft print servers, file servers, protocols (DHCP), and PKI to new on-premises servers.
Atlassian systems support
ScienceSoft’s Atlassian engineers handle the monitoring, optimization, updating, and troubleshooting tasks related to BPC’s Jira and Confluence systems. In addition, the team is responsible for configuring and managing Atlassian product integrations with SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft ADFS, and other infrastructure components. Upon request from BPC, our specialists also migrate particular projects and Atlassian components from the cloud to on-premises servers and vice versa.
As of March 2024, BPC has been relying on ScienceSoft’s ICT engineers for over 15 months. Satisfied with ScienceSoft’s services, BPC plans to expand our cooperation by increasing the scope of tasks entrusted to our specialists.
Key Outcomes for BPC
- A 10%+ reduction in infrastructure management and support costs due to outsourcing IT infrastructure tasks to ScienceSoft.
- Optimized workload for BPC’s in-house IT engineers, resulting in faster and more efficient issue resolution.
- Minimized risks of operational disruptions due to better control over the IT infrastructure components and proactive problem-solving.
- The ability to improve Microsoft Project Server and SharePoint performance and reduce maintenance costs thanks to strategic system redesign and evolution.
Daniil Svetlov, CIO at BPC, says:
BPC had to outsource a Tier 2–3 support team with a background in fintech to assist our in-house engineers with a range of system administration tasks. ScienceSoft has been filling this role for over a year, and their work has made all the difference for our IT operations. They are true engineers who think long-term and propose strategic decisions instead of micro-fixes, and, what is equally important, they carry them out as planned. From network management to SharePoint farm integration to PKI rollouts, I know I can count on them to get the job done and keep everything in order. I also appreciate that ScienceSoft approaches every infrastructure component with a solid understanding of security, so our cybersecurity division doesn’t have to discover new vulnerabilities after every deployment.
We opted for an outsourced team to reduce the strain on our internal support specialists, but ScienceSoft has brought much more to the table. With their assistance, we optimized a significant part of our IT infrastructure and reduced the share of manual work.
Thanks for a job well done, guys.
Techs and Tools
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2019, Microsoft Project Server 2019, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Dynamics 365, PowerShell, Jira, Confluence, Zabix, Kibana.
