Equifax Uses AWS to Achieve Higher Scalability and Performance for Mission-Critical Financial Applications

Equifax addressed its scalability and performance issues by moving its entire Oracle application suite to Amazon Web Services (AWS), running on hundreds of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for persistent block level storage. “AWS is the right technology for us because it enables us to scale horizontally and vertically,” says Tulsian.

Equifax worked with AWS partner Cloudreach during the migration and employed AWS CloudEndure Migration to simplify, expedite, and automate large-scale migration of the Oracle BRM application to AWS. Equifax initially migrated its ERP and Hyperion solutions to AWS and then migrated the Oracle BRM application to the cloud in a second phase. The company’s applications run on more than 850 vCPUs, storing over 100 TB of data across approximately 350 Amazon EBS volumes. Equifax also uses 31 Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances, with a database size of 12 TB.

By migrating its Oracle infrastructure to AWS, Equifax greatly increased the performance of its Hyperion platform for reporting. “We have seen up to a 300 percent improvement in performance for our Hyperion environment,” says Tulsian. “This helps our employees run their reports faster to meet close-of-business deadlines for monthly reporting, without us needing to manually intervene to add compute capacity.”

Equifax has also seen performance improvements for its ERP and billing systems on AWS. “Previously, we couldn’t easily adjust the billing platform, but now we can do that on the AWS Cloud,” says Tulsian.

AWS also gives Equifax the flexibility and scalability to conduct business globally, ensuring reliable application delivery in multiple countries across the globe. “We anticipate major growth in our billing processes in the near future, and AWS enables us to truly go global to support that,” says Tulsian. “This capability was essential for our business, and we could not have done it using our previous infrastructure. We now have the flexibility and scalability to grow faster. By running our platforms on AWS, we can support an always-on strategy that gives our business users the ability to communicate with us at all times across the globe.”

Equifax has also improved its monitoring and reporting capabilities and become more proactive about resource utilization, so it can adjust compute resources as needed to enable more efficient application environment scaling. “Our on-premises solution was very difficult to adjust and scale, but it is simple on AWS,” says Youssef Ismaili, vice president, global financial systems and cloud adoption at Equifax. “This will help us as we continue scaling our applications moving forward.”

As Equifax grows its applications globally, the company plans to continue to rely on AWS for support. “AWS has been exemplary to work with, and I wish other vendors would have a similar approach,” says Tulsian. “AWS is a strong collaborator that not only helps us solve business problems but also helps us optimize our environment to keep costs down and continuously improve efficiencies. We look forward to continuing our partnership as our business moves ahead.”