Established in 1981, Astra Financial is a rapidly growing retail financial provider in Indonesia. It has several financial institutions, including banking, insurance, financial services, pension funds, and venture capital. Currently, Astra Financial is a network of 11 financial business units. With the growth in the financial industry, Astra Financial aims to become the leading retail financial provider in Indonesia and contribute to Indonesian prosperity.

Astra Financial was looking to collaborate with a Cloud partner to leverage a stable cloud-native infrastructure to develop financial services applications. It required an easy-to-use, secure, and reliable cloud platform that supports the rapid development of its big data application that runs on Cloudera, and other applications, including a mobile app focusing on multi-finance called Moxa.

Astra Financial was primarily looking to resolve the following challenges:

●It needed a cloud solution that facilitates Cloudera services by ensuring high disk speed, a reasonably high network speed, and cost-efficiency.
●Prioritize the digitalization of the existing business units. Simplify consolidation of different business units to enable easy analysis of each unit.
●Launch Moxa application to help address various financial needs of the end-users. This application enables users to find financial services and products that suit their needs.
●Meet all the necessary data security requirements and local compliance and industry regulations.

With Alibaba Cloud's exceptional global track record of providing innovative, reliable, and secure cloud computing capabilities along with its growing presence in Indonesia, collaborating with Alibaba Cloud was an ideal option for Astra Financial. Alibaba cloud's local data centers ensure a low latency connection between Astra Financial applications and end-users, high availability, and business continuity in the wake of disasters. Its complete stack of cloud solutions meets several application requirements, making it the go-to choice for Astra Financial.

Furthermore, Alibaba Cloud's robust security services ensure data security and adherence to local compliance and industry regulations. Moreover, swift response and continuous assistance from Alibaba Cloud's experienced team of experts support Astra Financial throughout its business journey.

On its digital transformation journey with Alibaba Cloud, Astra Financial leverages an array of cloud services in several phases.

1.Big Data Phase: It's the first and most crucial phase for Astra Financial, where it had to decide which cloud partner would be ideal for its digital transformation journey. Its current Big Data vendor, Cloudera, has always operated on-premises. Therefore, moving to the cloud was a bit challenging. Astra Financial chose Alibaba Cloud after performing a stress test on disk to measure the performance using Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) with Processor 32 Core Memory 128 GB and storage SSD 400 GB.

2.Moxa Application Phase: Agility and stability were the main priorities for this phase. Astra Financial employed various Alibaba Cloud services in this phase, including Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes, Content Delivery Network (CDN), Object Storage Service (OSS), ApsaraDB for RDS PostgreSQL, and Alibaba Cloud API Gateway.

3.Operations, Security, and Disaster Recovery Phase: As a rapidly evolving company, Astra Financial is always concerned about service availability. To achieve this business objective, it deployed some of the critical Alibaba Cloud services, such as Web Application Firewall (WAF), CloudMonitor, Multi-zone RDS instances, and Object Storage Service (OSS).

4.Monitoring Phase: Astra Financial is very concerned about security and vulnerabilities and uses Alibaba Cloud Log Service and API Gateway to monitor code and security perimeters. Astra Financial currently uses a third-party API Gateway installed on top of the Alibaba Cloud and hence needs to monitor how many error codes are generated by the API Gateway on each server. It utilizes the Alibaba Cloud Log Service to create a dashboard and alarm to trigger emails for any suspicious event. The Alibaba Cloud Log Service also helps to take appropriate action based on the API Gateway logs.

PT Astra Financial strives to be the leading retail financial services provider in Indonesia and views Alibaba Cloud as a crucial partner in its growth journey. Moving forward, it plans to run entirely on Alibaba Cloud and launch new services supported by the cloud services giant. Astra Financial’s latest mobile application for Multi-Finance service, Moxa, is also supported by Alibaba Cloud. The company aspires to innovate and transform digitally through its long-term collaboration with Alibaba Cloud.