"We managed to address almost all of these issues simply by adopting an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud strategy,” says Neumann. “We launched new systems into production within minutes instead of months or even weeks, and successfully avoided having to negotiate with data centers, provision rack space, and procure the required hardware. We worked with Riverbed, which enabled us to connect our ERP directly to the cloud.” Neumann describes how the AWS solution was initially used at Banro: “Our first system, Microsoft Exchange 2010, was rolled out in about four weeks. The migration of our production Sage ERP X3 (and auxiliary components), along with creating the environment and user acceptance testing, took about eight weeks.

Banro uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) as an offshore data center solution, running eight full-time instances ranging from m1.small to m2.2xlarge.

Another component of Banro’s cloud solution is a global distributed Active Directory, with two domain controllers in the cloud replicating to regional servers. At the time it was deployed, says Neumann, “VPC with multiple IPSec end-points was not available. We rolled out our entire Active Directory architecture using public DNS, fixed ports and custom firewall rules to support replication.” The Active Directory enables shared identity, authentication, and policies to be applied to Banro’s five offices in Canada and the DRC.

Banro has also migrated its production Sage ERP X3 system to AWS, in addition to its web-based workflow solution and central financial reporting data warehouse. Neumann comments, “The ability for us to create our own subnets together with static IPs has enabled us to migrate all systems without hassle or tedious reconfiguration.”

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) provides a secure, isolated environment for these highly sensitive production systems. Neumann notes, “We are in the process of linking every one of our remote sites to a Customer Gateway to route internal traffic over secure IPSec tunnels. Our first site is undergoing proof of concept.”

Finally, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is used for offsite backups. Figure 1 illustrates Banro’s architecture.