E-Hroshi: building a reliable and secure IT infrastructure for an online microloan service

E-Hroshi is the most popular online microcredit service in Ukraine offering favourable terms and conditions. An application for a loan can be submitted 24/7 on the official website. To make the procedure as transparent, convenient and secure as possible, the company has developed a mobile application, it uses BankID to log in users and comply with the 18+ age limit.

E-Hroshi service has repeatedly received prestigious awards. In 2023, the company won a silver medal at FinAwards 2023 as the Best MFI Product and a bronze medal as the Best MFI for Customer Service. In order to maintain and strengthen its reputation, protect sensitive customer information and provide customers with the best solutions, the company strives to implement best practices in building the infrastructure to host E-Hroshi IT services.

IT services play a key role in E-Hroshi microloan service operations. The reputation and customer and partner loyalty directly depend on the quality and smooth application acceptance, processing, approval and subsequent procedures that make up the customer experience.

Previously, the client’s IT infrastructure was hosted by two other providers, but service and support quality did not meet the high business requirements. In order to become more flexible in building business processes, to be able to analyse the current situation and fully implement its development strategy, the company needed IT infrastructure that operates as a precise time-based framework.

E-Hroshi considered working with other service providers, but those providers did not meet the client’s requirements. Moreover, it wanted to move the entire external infrastructure to a single service provider that would meet all the requirements of the terms of reference.

Colobridge, a geo-distributed platform that combines two certified data centres that in fact meet Tier III/Tier III+, met the client’s requirements. The company was able to provide the required security level when it came to server and network infrastructure, had all the necessary physical and cloud products, and the technical capacity to implement extra data protection scenarios.

The migration was divided into several stages to ensure that E-Hroshi’s IT services continued to operate without interruption. If their work was interrupted by the fact that some data was unavailable, these data were transferred pursuant to a plan developed in advance, when IT infrastructure load was minimal (at night). Alongside the main infrastructure, some services were initially deployed simultaneously on Colobridge platform. When the tests showed that everything was working steadily and in a predictable manner, the load was fully switched to the new platform.

The IT infrastructure was based on dedicated servers provided by Colobridge via service model. As a result, a full-fledged virtualisation cluster was built, which is actually a special type of Private Cloud. For database storage, the company uses block cloud storage (BSaaS) which enables centralised data management and is easily scalable if necessary. Now, the client backs up data there on its own, although it initially used Backup as a Service (BaaS). Instead of renting network routers, the required number of different types of ports is used, once again via service model (Port as a Service).

The client’s IT services are now hosted by leading data centre operators and are protected from third-party access and accidental deletion/damage. The company has received exactly the kind of physical and cloud products that meet its current performance needs, as well as scalability in the future. It uses reliable storage for its data and its copies. Key E-Hroshi services were migrated to the new platform with the utmost care, unnoticed by the client’s users and partners, and are now stable and available 24/7 even during peak loads.