Hybrid Cloud Enables More Business with Less Cost

A natural gas marketing company that buys and sells natural gas was looking for a way to increase the number of trading partners they work with while reducing the overall cost. The challenge they had was that they were reliant on a external VAN(value added network) for all trading partner communications. This not only increased the costs but it reduced the control they had with those integrations.  This company also did not have the infrastructure necessary to setup a secure DMZ network with the necessary availability requirements.  

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We worked with this company build a solution in Azure that allowed them to have a secure set of services that were publicly accessible without having to make any changes with the on-premises network.  We setup and configured Azure Service Bus Relay to create outbound connections from services that were hosted on-premises to the newly developed API’s in Azure. This solution provides not only reliable messaging through Service Bus queues but is also secured by Azure Active Directory. These services are configured in a high availability configuration and protect their customers when any of the on-premises infrastructure is not available.

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The benefit this solution provided was that it allowed the company to take back control of trading partner integration to provide a higher level of service. They were also able to expand EDI integration to several more trading partners with minimal to no change on the trading partner side.

The cost savings were significantly reduced from over $20,000 per month of VAN costs to only $300 per month in Azure hosting fees.

This solution provided a way for this company to create a secure hybrid cloud solution for publicly exposing integration end points without having to make any on-premises infrastructure changes.

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