- Customer Success Story -
GoRight’s Journey in App Modernization with CloudServus
GoRight
Data-driven fleet maintenance done right. GoRight Smart Fleet Solutions (GoRight) embraces a modern approach towards fleet maintenance and repair services to ensure trucks stay on the road, equipment stays safe, and customers stay happy.
With solutions designed to exploit the potential of asset data to optimize fleet management, GoRight addresses the end-to-end lifecycle management of transportation equipment.
Serving customers in Canada and the United States, GoRight leverages Mirlin, a cloud-based fleet management application ecosystem, to ensure their customers can monitor and measure all repair and maintenance progress in real-time. Mirlin aims to be a one stop shop for fleet management with mobile and web capabilities to give customers an edge on managing their fleet.
GoRight wanted to utilize modern Azure native services as a foundation for their modernization and transform their application architecture to become more secure, scalable, and adaptable as their organization grew.
Ultimately, their goal was to launch their app in Azure Marketplace, optimize user onboarding and identity management. GoRight also needed to ensure their infrastructure could support modern, agile DevOps practices and methodologies to drive future innovation.
GoRight's Company Vision
To be positioned as a trusted source of expertise for their customers and ensure the company is well-equipped and empowered to deliver the right answers, resources, and strategies to help customers thrive in an ever-changing business landscape.
The Challenges: App Architecture Limitations & Inefficient User Management
If GoRight was going to take their app to the next level, they needed to focus on strengthening security, connectivity, and user management and improving the user experience (UX).
Given the breadth, diversity, and velocity of modern cyberthreats, enabling robust security for their application architecture via a holistic approach was the organization’s primary goal.
GoRight was running Azure SignalR embedded directly within their web API, and it was no longer suitable for handling a large-scale usage. The associated increase in users and traffic volumes can create bottlenecks in the API server, leading to performance degradation and decreased scalability.
Additionally, they were using an ASP.NET identity to secure their application. ASP.NET is often sufficient for smaller businesses and internal applications but can’t meet the extensive security demands of enterprise-level applications.
GoRight’s application architect recognized the need to leverage a Single Sign-On (SSO), such as Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), to enhance security, identity and access management, and user onboarding. Their existing approach to user management was inefficient; setting up a new user involved a lot of SQL (Structure Query Language) and hacking, which complicated user onboarding.
But while familiar with Azure Services, the application architect was uncertain how to connect and streamline services with Mirlin Connect App, the frontend application used for fleet management operations. Establishing the desired level of security for their app via the potential use of Azure Services was also a roadblock, considering the scope of GoRight’s resource limitations.
Furthermore, the company’s DevOps team consisted of a single individual who had been manually deploying updates to the Dev environment since 2016. The developer had created his own DevOps workflow and methodologies that were adequate for a single developer, but the unit was outgrowing this workflow as GoRight introduced more developers to the team.
The team had minimal time and flexibility to conduct the required research to implement and integrate a SSO solution or explore additional tools that could improve testing, deployment, and updates to enable rapid development cycles. These limitations had resulted in a patchwork of temporary solutions that were not viable long-term.
GoRight was determined to engage an experienced partner who could work closely with their solution architect so their organization could implement a holistic framework for identity management, improve their DevOps processes, and effectively prepare to launch their app in Azure Marketplace.
Problems at a Glance:
Application Architecture Impedes Future-Ready App Development
- Legacy security: Use of ASP.NET identity for app security was inadequate to meet the complex security requirements of enterprise-level applications.
- Complex user management process: Setting up new users required extensive use of SQL and unconventional methods, complicating user onboarding.
- Resource limitations: The company’s solution architect had minimal time and flexibility to implement a Single Sign-On (SSO) solution or explore additional tools to help optimize their solution architecture and DevOps pipeline.
- Single Point of Failure: Much of the application was centered around one tier and impacts to that infrastructure would impact all users.
The Solution: Enhancing DevOps, App Security & Identity Management through Holistic Azure Modernization
GoRight initially reached out to CloudServus to help optimize their licensing and the consultation led to a discovery of software dynamics that were conflicting with the app’s service.
I was asked to have a meeting with a company I had never heard of before and give a description of how our system architecture worked with Mirlin Connect and how the data flows through the system. David Vanderslice, Practice Director, of Cloud Solutions, Applications & Data at CloudServus really understood what I was talking about and it was the first time I had encountered that in a while. We really hit it off, so I was very happy and excited to hear that our company was open to working with CloudServus. - Matt Waldron, VP of Software Engineering at GoRight.
CloudServus kicked off the engagement by establishing a weekly meeting schedule with GoRight’s DevOps team. Spearheaded by Sage Rhinehart – Project Manager and Scrum Master at CloudServus, the regular consultations ensured all parties remained on the same page regarding timelines and project progress.
As a first step, CloudServus integrated the GoRight API with Azure Active Directory (Microsoft Entra ID) to enable GoRight to readily add new users and eliminate any onboarding complexities. Many of the company’s customers have their own identity providers, and the new solution allows customers to manage onboarding to the solution.
Modernization of identity management, including SSO that was written directly into their application stack using MS Authentication Library, also facilitated seamless user authentication.Due to the fact that much of the onboarding was manual, CloudServus wrote onboarding workflows to allow automated provisioning of users and internal licenses.
David helped us write an Azure Logic app where we just take a CSV file, put those user IDs into the CSV, and upload it, and it adds them to our active directory. It also loads them up into our database so they’re ready to go. It’s been a huge time savings for us, and the ease of use is a big benefit.”- Matt Waldron, VP of Software Engineering at GoRight.
CloudServus addressed the Azure SignalR challenges that GoRight was experiencing by helping them move away from the direct integration within their web API and enabling Azure SignalR to reside outside of their app. By using Azure SignalR as a standalone service, their web API is simplified, and the new approach is better suited for scalability and performance.
Azure Key Vault was implemented to enable secure, centralized management and storage of sensitive application data, including certificates, keys, and connection strings. The solution provides robust access controls and auditing capabilities for enhanced security and compliance.
The DevOps bottlenecks GoRight had previously struggled with were resolved by building out pipelines and Azure DevOps, which eliminates the potential for human error via automation and enables their team to execute their own builds and deployments.
The branching strategy was also changed to GitHub Flow, a branch-based workflow method for software collaboration and development using Git and GitHub, which promotes continuous integration for more reliable and efficient software delivery.
Partnering with CloudServus pushed us towards improving our system and getting it better prepared to expose our app in Azure Marketplace. We now have the momentum we need to realize our goal.
The Results: A Next-Gen App, Ready for Customers
Modernizing GoRight’s identity management and DevOps workflows and transforming their app architecture to use a modern Azure infrastructure has prepared the organization to successfully expose their app through Azure Marketplace and deliver an excellent user experience for their customers.
CloudServus’ holistic approach to security, including deploying Azure Key Vault and implementing a SSO solution, has created a completely safeguarded, compliant, and optimized environment. This was a critical result as GoRight often receives inquiries from important customers regarding security and how they manage different security scenarios, and the company now feels entirely confident in their ability to provide the right answers on-demand.
When needed, GoRight can also refer to a customized document created by CloudServus that contains consolidated security information to further help their organization address customer questions.
“But if we ever get into a jam, we know that we can always call David and he can field those questions for us,” adds Matt Waldon. “It’s nice to have the additional help in our corner.”
The pivot away from direct Azure SignalR integration simplifies code and has created a much more enjoyable and smoother web app experience. Additionally, the app can efficiently and effectively handle real-time updates and can scale to accommodate changes in user and traffic volumes. - Matt Waldron, VP of Software Engineering at GoRight
Transforming GoRight’s DevOps branching strategy to GitHub Flow empowers their team to explore new, modern DevOps tools, collaborate more effectively, and manage pipelines themselves. Pipeline automation also reduces risks, accelerates code development and deployment, and ensures a consistent production environment.
CloudServus’ team, including Rob Atilho, Senior Developer at CloudServus, continues to play a role in ongoing Azure modernization projects with GoRight as they arise. “Rob has helped us out a lot and is like an extended member of our team. If we need something that’s Azure-related and we’re not sure how to do it, I know Rob can. He always seems to get it done,” says Matt Waldron.
Additional requirements for the business for application resiliency influenced the design. Having an active/active multi-region deployment of Mirlin connect allowed confidence that the solution was available regardless of platform or backend application issues.
Adopting Azure Front Door service, a global cloud service by design allowed CloudServus and GoRight to address the multi-region availability for the Azure Static Web App, the frontend, presented to customers on the web and within the mobile application. Also, to take advantage of the Web Application Firewall components to protect their customers data.
All of this additional functionality wouldn’t be easily adopted without the DevOps process modernization. As deploying to one or multiple regions was a simple exercise for GoRight. As well as managing uniform, consistent infrastructure deployments through infrastructure as code. All contained with the pipelines authored during this engagement.
With the powerful results of this Azure modernization program, GoRight is accelerating towards their ultimate goal: to release their app on Azure Marketplace and continue to bring exciting, innovative new products to their customers.
Results at a Glance:
Targeted Azure Modernization Drives Relentless Security & Sets the Stage for Continuous App Innovation
- Pipeline automation: Introducing automation into the company’s DevOps pipelines eradicates human-prone errors and increases the efficiency of deploying updates.
- Enhanced security: A robust security management system mitigates potential risks, protects authentication credentials, and maximizes the safety of GoRight’s application.
- Improved web app UX: A Single Sign-On solution facilitates smoother user onboarding and delivers a better user experience.
- Empowered DevOps team: GoRight’s DevOps team is equipped to leverage modern DevOps practices and tools to optimize code development, better collaborate, and eliminate the .net framework in their system.