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 favorable 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 that uses BankID for user login, ensuring compliance with the 18+ age limit.

E-Hroshi has received prestigious awards, including a silver medal at FinAwards 2023 for the Best MFI Product and a bronze medal for the Best MFI for Customer Service. To maintain and strengthen its reputation, protect sensitive customer information, and provide clients 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 loyalty of customers and partners directly depend on the quality and smooth operation of application acceptance, processing, approval, and subsequent procedures that shape the customer experience.

Previously, the client’s IT infrastructure was hosted by two other providers, but the service and support quality did not meet high business requirements. To become more flexible in building business processes, analyze 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 meet Tier III/Tier III+, met the client’s requirements. The company was able to provide the required security level for server and network infrastructure, had all the necessary physical and cloud products, and the technical capacity to implement additional 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 due to data unavailability, those data were transferred according to a pre-developed plan when IT infrastructure load was minimal (at night). Alongside the main infrastructure, some services were initially deployed simultaneously on the Colobridge platform. When tests showed that everything was working steadily and predictably, the load was fully switched to the new platform.

The IT infrastructure was based on dedicated servers provided by Colobridge through a service model. As a result, a full-fledged virtualisation cluster was built, which is essentially a special type of Private Cloud. For database storage, the company uses block cloud storage (BSaaS), enabling centralized data management and easy scalability. Now, the client backs up data there independently, although it initially utilized Backup as a Service (BaaS). Instead of renting network routers, the required number of various types of ports is used, again through the 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 or damage. The company has received the physical and cloud products that meet its current performance needs, as well as future scalability. It uses reliable storage for its data and its copies. Key E-Hroshi services were migrated to the new platform with utmost care, unnoticed by the client’s users and partners, and are now stable and available 24/7 even during peak loads.