The Customer
Established in 2001, iPayroll Ltd is New Zealand's premier online payroll provider and largest independent IRD-listed PAYE intermediary payroll service. Processing over $4 billion in client payroll each year. iPayroll operate in both the New Zealand and Australian markets, with the Australian business operating under its fully owned subsidiary, CloudPayroll Pty Ltd.
Offering services for both business owners and accounting partners, iPayroll also have interface connections into a multitude of related systems, including Xero, MYOB, Microsoft Dynamics and many more.
As the iPayroll group move services and applications into AWS, they were looking for a specialised cloud managed services and support partner to provide 24/7 support. With features such as AWS Enterprise Support and follow-the-sun offerings, AC3 could offer a full stack support experience tailored to suit them during the entire life-cycle of their cloud adoption, and beyond. This would give iPayroll the added comfort of having a professional team supporting their cloud environment while their local team mastered the cloud.
The Challenge
iPayroll made the decision to migrate their CloudPayroll application and associated infrastructure out of a traditional data centre and into AWS. Their three-fold migration objectives were:
To achieve the desired level of compliance in accordance with the Australian Tax Office’s new Single Touch Payroll initiative. To give their developers the flexibility to effectively manage the platform, with increased scalability, allowing a move to infrastructure as code. To take advantage of the improved controls over costs and managing elastic workloads. With AWS, iPayroll can spin up more environments on demand and when they need them. They will also have increased productivity and managed infrastructure costs.
The Solution
AC3 leveraged extensive AWS public cloud capabilities to deliver a comprehensive technical solution for iPayroll. The solution included a migration strategy that allowed iPayroll to meet several regulatory market requirements, grow their technical capability and most importantly, minimise disruption to their customers.
With AC3 solution architects partnering with iPayroll’s internal development team, we were able to expand the breadth and depth of public cloud infrastructure knowledge within their team and share best practice processes to deliver a seamless transition to AWS.
AC3 worked closely with iPayroll to deliver their AWS foundation structure, system architecture and application code in an end-to-end pipeline, using Docker containers as their primary hosting model. This allowed them to take advantage of Amazon next generation services such as CloudFront. As a result, they were able to continuously monitor and review deployments in a timely and more efficient manner.
The Results
Release more frequently at low risk
From a speed point of view, there was a low risk of delays in releasing features to the market. They were able to spin up more environments quickly and do various testing on demand. This allowed their internal teams to experiment a lot quicker and gave them the opportunity to fail fast to find the right solution.
Improved security posture
With AC3’s assistance in architecting their AWS cloud environment, iPayroll were able to achieve compliance with stringent customer requirements while building a fully resilient, best-practice AWS cloud platform.
Improved team efficiency to enable them to scale
iPayroll’s technical team were able to leverage AC3’s AWS certified engineers for guidance and support. They now have the confidence that their mission critical infrastructure is proactively monitored, and critical incidents are treated with highest priority 24 hours a day, 7 days a week throughout the year.
Cost savings and better customer experience
iPayroll were able to take advantage of spot pricing to reduce costs and scale on demand on AWS cloud. Their systems and infrastructure, which were architected by certified engineers, provided an extremely high level of client satisfaction and retention, with the goal of generating more revenue for their business.