Infrastructure Modernization Boosts Home Lender’s Business Agility

Overview

Challenge

• Ditech was looking to modernize its IT infrastructure to facilitate the deployment of future products and features, while minimizing operating costs. The company required a secure migration that would boost overall agility.

Solution

• Hitachi Vantara provided business consulting services to develop a plan for Ditech. It executed hybrid cloud deployment based on a secure, best-in-class and future-ready infrastructure that aligned with industry-standard compliance frameworks.

About Ditech

“Ditech” is a well-known home lender. Headquartered in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, the company provides residential mortgage products through a team of home loan specialists who are easily accessible by phone, online and in person. The company’s Correspondent Lending division has a legacy of building successful business solutions and partners with financial institutions, nationwide, providing capital market expertise and financial stability.

Ditech’s Cloud Story

Ditech wanted to modernize its IT infrastructure to increase agility and bring new products and features to its website and applications. At the same time, it wanted to reduce costs by migrating its business applications and Citrix remote desktop environments to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. First, Ditech leveraged business consulting services from Hitachi Vantara to create a complete application rationalization assessment and cloud migration strategy along with a proposed implementation plan and timeline. In the report, Hitachi created a business case analysis, security risk matrix, and total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) calculations to provide an in-depth look how to move successfully on the cloud and realize opportunities for significant costs savings.

Ditech Chooses Solution

Ditech chose to use AWS as its cloud infrastructure provider, based on costs, security, agility and comprehensive IT platorm. However, Ditech selected to provide technical implementation services and create a professional services partnership. The company was chosen as the trusted AWS partner for cloud consulting services after a stringent request for proposal (RFP) evaluation process, due to its proven expertise in migrating and securing cloud workloads and its relentless approach to and passion for client success.

Ditech’s Cloud Program

Hitachi Vantara worked on-site, hand-in-hand with Ditech’s cloud engineering team. The ongoing partnership included creating a hybrid cloud infrastructure, a best-in-class security architecture, and also federating identity management with Microsoft Active Directory integration.

Ben Hill, former CTO of Ditech, states, “Their cloud architects construct best-in-class infrastructure and security designs and can align them to industry-standard compliance frameworks. Their engineers do an excellent job of bringing those designs to life, and they interact well with our team.”

Furthermore, the solution team helped Ditech migrate a Citrix remote desktop environment with over 250 virtual machines serving over 1,800 Ditech employees. The Citrix project included moving SQL database servers, storefront servers, Netscaler appliances, a XenDesktop delivery controller, and creating master and cloned images of XenApp servers, client access license and domain controllers. The effort also included hardening the server Amazon Machine Images with antivirus, updates and patches, enforced group policies and Citrix profiles.

Ben Hill, explains how Hitachi Vantara has been a value-added partner with its cloud program: “We are thrilled to partner with Hitachi Vantara to integrate AWS into our corporate infrastructure. They have been a good partner to us, working with us to meet our business needs and adapting to the ever-changing business environment. Our partnership with Hitachi allows us to focus on building business value on top of the agile infrastructure they are creating for us.”