Setur gains centralized management and cloud-scale innovation with Azure Arc

Flexing for the future

Because of the nature of its business and investments in hardware, Setur needs to retain an on-premises environment. The company’s duty-free business involves highly sensitive data, like flight, password, and duty-free purchase information. The KVKK Personal Data Protection Law, Türkiye's implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), requires Setur to manage that data locally. Also, the company has a standing hardware agreement with KoçSistem—an Azure Expert Managed Services Provider and Gold-tier member of the Microsoft Partner Network—to manage two of its business-critical systems and its datacenter. So, to bring versatility and innovative cloud capabilities to its on-premises environment, Setur needed a flexible, scalable, and reliable cloud solution and found it with Microsoft Azure Arc.

Visibility and versatility enabled by Azure Arc

Kaan Ara, former Senior Specialist, Cloud and System Development at Setur, recalls the company’s dual mandate to achieve greater agility while maintaining onsite hardware. Setur found the fulcrum for this flexibility in Azure Arc. “We wanted to be as secure and agile as possible, be able to adopt new technology, and remain ready for the future,” says Ara. “With Azure Arc, we’re no longer restricted by our hardware. We’re free to use any service that suits our needs.”

With Azure Arc, the company can run all its regulated workloads on-premises, maintain its KoçSistem-managed datacenter, and, at the same time, extend the Azure services it needs—like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure App Service—to its on-premises infrastructure. Setur now has ample opportunity to streamline and modernize its IT operations and application development. For example, the Setur Development & DevOps Team decided to use Azure to undertake some key development opportunities to enhance enterprise resource planning (ERP) at the company, adding services like Azure Cosmos DB, Azure PostgreSQL Database, and Azure SQL Managed Instance. “We had no requirements to keep our ERP systems and apps on-premises, so we developed them through AKS for greater flexibility.” The company uses Azure Arc–enabled VMware vSphere to centrally manage its distributed VMware vSphere environment through a single, simplified control plane.

Better protected environments

Through Azure Arc, Setur has also gained powerful new security capabilities. The company added Microsoft Defender for Cloud to define and implement security policies across its cloud and on-premises environments and to configure email notifications for security alerts. Setur is taking advantage of Microsoft Sentinel as an alternative to a security operations center, using it to handle configuration management and other security information and event management tasks across its environments. The company stores and safeguards its certificates with Azure Key Vault, which automatically enrolls and renews the certificates of its websites. And it benefits from applying the same strong identity protection and Conditional Access policies throughout its on-premises and cloud environments via Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Setur manages all its accounts and passwords, including those tied to on-premises applications, through one central Azure AD location.

Extending such advanced security to its on-premises infrastructure and managing both its on-premises and cloud environments centrally helps Setur strengthen its security posture. Faik Unal, Information Security & System Development Manager at Setur, states, “With Azure Arc, we now have a really secure VM [virtual machine] solution based on predefined security rules. We can define a security policy for a VM, and it gets applied automatically, and we can manage automatic Windows update solutions and see all our resources in one window. It makes life easier. So does the great help and support we get from the Microsoft team, who we can reach whenever we need them.“

With its partnership with KoçSistem, an authorized Azure Arc implementer, Setur can continue to derive value from its legacy on-premises hardware and remain in compliance with hardware-related regulations. Through its adoption of Azure Arc, it can now innovate and respond to internal and customer needs with alacrity. Getting the best of both worlds, the company creates, deploys, and manages cloud-native applications and services while enjoying comprehensive security, centralized visibility, and streamlined management. Ara says, “The biggest benefit for me is the visibility. We can easily manage our services from the Azure portal, see what’s in our configuration, and manage on-premises systems like SQL servers and Windows or Linux physical and virtual servers, controlling it all from Azure Arc.”

Doing more with less

With its Azure Arc deployment, Setur has gained the scale and innovation opportunities of Azure Cloud Services while maximizing long-term investments and meeting compliance. This has changed how its DevOps teams operate. They have embraced Azure DevOps as a key development tool, using it to support an agile deployment approach with ongoing release cycles. In addition, Setur is using Azure Storage for its on-premises backup, with server backup, database, and service logs, and it’s storing all its AKS application data with Azure Storage as well. While AKS and Azure Storage provide greater flexibility for Setur, Azure Arc delivers the means to manage its environments more efficiently. In addition, the company plans to deploy more development environments through AKS on-premises—especially for its regulated, personally identifiable information workloads.

The scale of the Azure platform helps Setur flex to accommodate higher and lower periods of use. The company can create and delete VMs in Azure to easily support fast-changing business requirements. “The flow of incoming traffic depends on the time and date,” Ara says. “Our customers are travelers, so the high season for us is summertime and holidays. During those, we need our applications to meet demand, but when you’ve got legacy systems on-premises, it’s hard to scale as effectively as with the cloud. So, that was a main driver for us to use Azure Arc to set up in Azure.”

Versatility is important, and so is visibility. “Before, some tools and environments were only visible to the employees who used them,” says Ara. “Thanks to Azure Arc, we have complete visibility over all environments for anyone who needs it. We can better see our resources and better manage our services.” The visibility gained through its Azure Arc deployment means Setur now continuously monitors and manages its entire infrastructure from a single pane of glass. “Everything is visible in Azure,” Ara states. “To see new applications along with our on-premises services is just amazing.”

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