YJFX Adopts Red Hat OpenStack Platform to Build Out Customer Service Infrastructure 

YJFX provides online foreign exchange (forex) trading services in 22 currencies as well as investment trust services. As a leading service provider in the forex industry, YJFX constantly seeks new ways to improve customer satisfaction along with the reliability and quality of its offered services, both current and new. To continue enhancing the customer experience, YJFX wanted to drive innovation at all levels of the company’s IT stack, starting with the infrastructure layer.

The company’s existing IT environment for building new services used proprietary virtualization technologies running on public cloud infrastructure. While workable, this strategy made delivering new infrastructure environments in a timely manner difficult. The IT teams in charge of the infrastructure had to manually make adjustments to deliver individual environments and servers, increasing time to market of new services while increasing procurement costs. From a cost and time perspective, these challenges limited YJFX’s ability to drive innovation more quickly.

In order to drive down the costs and time associated with delivering new services, YJFX wanted to empower its developers to self-provision their environments more quickly without having to rely on IT operations teams. To do this, the company began exploring options beyond the public cloud in 2018, ultimately electing to migrate to a scalable, private cloud built on Red Hat OpenStack.

Built on the open industry standards of the OpenStack project, Red Hat OpenStack Platform delivers the innovation of the OpenStack community to YJFX paired with hardened codes, enterprise security updates and the expertise and support of Red Hat. YJFX also participated in a discovery session of the Red Hat infrastructure migration solution, provided by Red Hat. With the support of Red Hat Consulting, YJFX was able to better visualize the issues and effects of the migration project as well as conceptualize an image of the ideal private cloud development environment. To deploy the new Red Hat-based private cloud, YJFX enlisted DTS CORPORATION, a systems integrator, to handle the migration work and build out the new infrastructure.

After comparing the costs of maintaining and operating its existing infrastructure to the new private cloud platform, YJFX expects to see the associated expenses lowered by 30-40 percent over the next five years. The time needed to prepare development environments, which previously could take as long as one month, has now been reduced to a few hours thanks to developers being able to self-provision resources. This has also led to a reduction in workload for IT operations staff while providing a flexible, scalable infrastructure layer that can help drive new application delivery and improve customer service.

The initial migration for the dealing room was completed at the end of April 2019.

"Red Hat OpenStack Platform enables flexible and scalable cloud-native infrastructure that can also provide on-demand, self-service capabilities to developers. By migrating the development environment from an external virtual environment to an on-premises private, cloud YJFX was able to reduce the workload on the personnel in charge of infrastructure and bring about more developer flexibility. Accordingly, YJFX’s IT organization can now find it easier to work on improving services and adding new features to meet customer needs," said Mochizuki Hirokazu, president and representative director, Red Hat K.K.

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