About Intercape
Intercape is the largest intercity passenger transport service operating in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique. They are dedicated to a vision of spreading hope wherever their coaches travel. Since 1979, they have developed an extensive network, uniting people across seven countries.
Challenges
Intercape invested in customer-facing applications as well as internal IT workloads such as their core platform for information management, online ticketing, storage, analytics and other services. Intercape is determined to continuously improve their end user experience and provide travelers with more real-time information. They've prioritized the development and consolidation of hybrid workloads not only for travelers but also their internal IT systems. They have started looking for support services, more agile, resilient and more cost effective cloud services to replace their current cloud service providers and hosting data centers. Initially, Intercape chose to run their workloads on both Azure and AWS. The Intercape infrastructure team soon encountered scalability challenges as they sought to process and run analysis on its data. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the transport industry and various OTA companies struggled to survive. This drove Intercape to look for world-class cloud provider locally hosted and more cost efficient solutions to support their business.
Pain Points
High cost
Intercape was looking for more cost reductions due to the COVID-19 complete lockdown so they could continue their operations and remain competitive.
No local support
As the operations expanded, Intercape needed better support services and dedicated local cloud team to assist them on an ongoing basis.
Complex operations
The multi-cloud strategy deploying resources on different cloud platforms was complicated and hard to run. It required a lot of time and effort from the support team.
Why HUAWEI CLOUD
HUAWEI CLOUD team worked with Intercape during the initial complete lockdown of COVID-19, making sure their business and production systems could continue to run without any impact. In a very short period of time, the Huawei team managed to build trust, prove we could meet their technical requirements and achieved 17%–20% additional cost savings. Due to the practical engagement between the Huawei Team and Intercape, only two initial meetings were held, followed by PoC and move to the production environment, all within one month. HUAWEI CLOUD local technical teams continue to support Intercape 7/24, always responding to any issues within 24 hours, making sure Intercape could be onboarded on HUAWEI CLOUD in the shortest possible time.
Solutions
Intercape deployed Huawei cloud infrastructure services and the integrated migration services to ease most of the work.
Ease of use: Intercape only needs to install and configure the Agent on the source server, set the target ECS on the SMS console, and start the migration task. SMS takes care of the rest.
Seamless migration: Intercape production workloads do not have to go down during the migration. They only need to stop services briefly before launching the target ECS. SMS ensures minimal downtime.
Robust compatibility: SMS migrates x86 physical servers and VMs from many popular private and public clouds. SMS supports migration of over 90 different OS images.
High-security SMS authenticates the migration Agent using an AK and SK pair. SMS uses a dynamically generated SSL certificate and key pair to encrypt the transmission channel for data security.
Benefits
As soon as Intercape was migrated to HUAWEI CLOUD, they saw huge improvement in migration and tracking with synchronization, and nearly no business and data loss during switchover. Immediately following the initial migration, they moved 90% of production workloads into HUAWEI CLOUD from on-premises hosting data centers and other cloud service providers. Within three weeks of moving to HUAWEI CLOUD, Intercape noticed a 17%-25% cost savings.
