Accountor Finago: Less overhead, smarter work with the cloud
What does a large software development company stand to gain from the public cloud? Accountor Finago started the transition to Azure to improve daily work for their development teams, free up capacity for innovation and create a resource-efficient, scalable service platform. First experiences have been very encouraging.
Some of the project’s key figures at the helm: Juha Havu from Accountor Finago and Antti Poutiainen from Polar Squad
Accountor Finago is the leading accounting software company in Finland. With over 120,000 corporate clients in the Nordics, they feature an extensive range of digital services with infrastructural needs to match. With Polar Squad, they created a secure, well-managed and scalable architecture accompanied by a roadmap to taking their services to Azure. After migrating the first services, they’re already reaping the benefits of the cloud.
“There are three principal reasons why migrating to Azure could save resources and enable smarter work for us. First, we’ve had a fairly sizable number of servers handling our service infrastructure. Second, our development and production environments have been using different technologies. And finally, we wanted to start using infrastructure as code technology”, says Juha Havu, Director of Technology, Innovation and Product Development at Accountor Finago.
Thorough planning for best results
With Polar Squad, Accountor Finago set out to define a well-architected framework taking them to the cloud. Planning and implementation were often done in tandem, enabling the project to move quickly.
Accountor Finago’s first public cloud implementation has been Junior, an AI assistant using machine learning to automate and help sales invoice processing for their clients.
“Accountor Finago’s greenfield project enabled us to plan in manageable chunks and expand our horizons as the situation called for it. Our role has been to act as a sparring partner to a knowledgeable client. Working closely together, we've been able to reap the benefits of cloud-native services and tools, such as Kubernetes, which Finago has already used in the past. We were able to create a hyper-scalable concept in short order”, describes Polar Squad’s Azure consultant Antti Poutiainen.
Reaping the full benefits of their new technologies has been a critical goal for Accountor Finago from the outset: “Carrying out a so-called lift and shift project would have been much quicker, but that would have denied us of many of the benefits of DevOps, infrastructure as code and managed services of public cloud, to name a few”, states Havu. “Public cloud migrations are too often approached as if they were about Office infrastructure, neglecting to see the cloud as an integral extension of software development. For us, infra is one part of development, not printers or CRM.”
Polar Squad scaled Accountor Finago’s existing container architecture with Kubernetes. They also have been in close collaboration with Microsoft concerning Azure infrastructure. According to Microsoft’s Lauri Liukko, the project is a forward-thinking greenfield approach to migrating a large host of services: “It’s a remarkable project in terms of scope and complexity. Accountor Finago and PolarSquad have achieved a resource-efficient way of carrying out a large project utilizing Azure’s cloud-native and PaaS services. The resulting architecture enables the scalability and automation required by modern SaaS application development and operations.”
Less overhead and better daily work
The transformation has seen its first successes, with the first solution running smoothly in the cloud. The next phase is about scaling up to migrate all services gradually.
“We’ve taken the considered approach to our migration. It’s been a wise decision, and soon we’re in the position to put our foot on the pedal. Once we fully transition to the public cloud, leaving behind old data centers and technologies, we can reap the benefits of the public cloud as well as the improved daily lives of our tech teams”, says Havu.
Azure-based cloud infrastructure holds a lot of promise for Accountor Finago. Beyond infrastructure as code and DevOps practices, they’re looking to migrate to a microservice architecture for their tech teams. “Being able to reduce overhead and free us from reinventing the process each time means our teams are free to work with a microservice mindset. The development process can be modularised, harmonising tooling company-wide while leaving some key decisions up to the teams”, describes Havu.
Accountor Finago does everything in service to their customers. Microservices enable quicker development cycles, while cloud infrastructure enables hyperscaling, reliability and security. “Accountor Finago is admirable in the way they keep their clients’ interests as their north star throughout this internal process. It also enabled us to carry out our work with a sense of clear purpose”, says Poutiainen.
Could we help make your transformation process a slam dunk?
Have a chat with Tuomas Lindholm –
tuomas.lindholm@polarsquad.com – +358 40 177 1719