Building a secure foundation for Arek’s public cloud migration
Moving to the public cloud increases efficiency and resilience. Arek's move to Google Cloud was made smooth by creating a migration path that met both business needs and regulatory requirements.
Modernization advisor, Tietoevry Tech Services
The challenge
Arek Ltd. plays a pivotal role in Finland’s pension infrastructure. After moving from a legacy mainframe to a private cloud environment using Google Anthos, Arek was ready to migrate to the public cloud. This move was expected to significantly enhance the efficiency, usability and security of the services provided to all pension providers in Finland.
Arek had a clear goal: to build a professionally managed, production-grade environment in the public cloud – a primarily Kubernetes-based platform using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), alongside managed services like Cloud SQL and Memorystore. Arek also aimed to deepen its DevOps practices, increase automation, and reduce maintenance needs, all while avoiding vendor lock-in.
The solution
We created a secure public cloud environment to ensure the safe migration of Arek’s business-critical services – adhering to the compliance, continuity, performance, and information security requirements set by the regulator, the Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority (Fiva).
To design a strong foundation for Arek’s secure public cloud migration, we facilitated a series of joint workshops covering all key areas: Organization, Identity, Networks, Operations, Security and Business continuity. The outcomes were documented in a Technical Design Document (TDD) and implemented as fully-automated Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform.
We implemented Arek’s cloud foundation on Google Cloud Platform, including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters, splitting the public and private application environments with security perimeter between them for segregation. The foundation was provisioned with disaster recovery capabilities, and it integrates with Arek’s established GitLab-based CI/CD pipelines, ensuring consistency with existing DevOps practices. With the foundation in place, Arek is now safely migrating its applications to the cloud. The project was executed in time and on budget.
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About the customer
Arek develops, maintains, and delivers shared IT services essential to Finland’s pension system. It provides pension calculation services to all pension providers in the country, ensuring the system runs reliably with high availability.
About ArekKey benefits
Enhanced compliance and security
Arek’s cloud foundation is fully aligned with regulatory compliance, continuity, performance, and information security requirements.
Improved operational efficiency
The shared Kubernetes platform lets multiple applications run on a common foundation, reducing resource waste. Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD further streamline deployment and management.
Business continuity & disaster recovery
The cloud foundation includes multi-region disaster recovery and backup capabilities. Built-in auto-healing and auto-scaling in GKE help ensure resilient, uninterrupted service availability.