Challenge

Ashfield Capital required a new website maintenance provider along with a solution for the future of the websites expanding needs. The original website was built as an ASP.NET 3.5 website project and allowed for client login, client monthly statement downloads, and daily portfolio values. PDF statements are uploaded each month for clients while daily values were being fed into the database via a nightly FTP feed.

Solution

The Ashfield Capital website was migrated to the Windows Azure cloud service hosting platform. This allowed for both staging and production environments of varying sizes for cost savings and enterprise class service. Monthly statements are uploaded to BLOB storage and are secured by user access control. The statements are kept protected in case of a failure or data loss with geo redundant data center duplication. Addtionally, the nightly client statement data is accepted and parsed into a database via a FTPS server in our Windows Azure start-up tasks. Lastly, Monthly code updates are pushed via the Windows Azure publish dialog utilizing VIP swapping to ensure continuous uptime.

Results

Ashfield Capital is pleased with the solution thanks to reduced costs from migrating to the Cloud based hosting, stable hosting with monthly updates that easily flow to their end clients. A strong relationship was established with Ashfield's IT department which was enabled by easy-to-configure dual environments for testing and production. IP based restrictions allow security and protection of the staging site from crawlers; ensuring only allow Ashfield content reviewers have access prior to it go live.