African Export–Import Bank, also referred to as Afreximbank, is a pan-African multilateral trade finance institution created in 1993 under the auspices of the African Development Bank. It is headquartered in Cairo, Egypt. Afreximbank’s vision is to be the trade finance bank for Africa.
Afreximbank’s mission statement is: “To stimulate a consistent expansion and diversification of African trade, to rapidly increase Africa’s share of global trade, and in doing so, to operate as a first-class, profit-oriented, socially responsible financial institution and a ‘Centre of Excellence in African Trade Matters.’” Afreximbank’s mandate is to finance and promote intra and extra African trade using three broad services:
- Credit (Trade finance and Project finance)
- Risk Bearing (Guarantees and Credit Insurance)
- Trade Information and Advisory Services
Afreximbank has 50 African member-countries. As of September 2019, the bank has three regional locations and is in the final stages of establishing a fourth regional office for Eastern Africa.
The regional offices are:
- Harare: managing the southern African countries
- Abidjan: managing francophone western and central African countries
- Abuja: managing anglophone western African countries
- Kampala: managing the counties in eastern Africa
- Yaounde: managing the countries in Central Africa
Post the infrastructure setup and security tightening for Afreximbank’s application and infrastructure, it was required to setup and configure the monitoring tools for the same. The monitoring tools would enable the support team to proactively monitor the AWS resources. This would ensure seamless operation and working of the business-critical applications and inline supporting infrastructure. This would also cater to the mandate to go LEAN and optimize AWS infrastructure costs by maximizing the utilization of resources onto the AWS cloud platform.
The managed services rendered by Citrus Consulting Services also required to enable the teams at Afreximbank to focus on their core competencies and let the management for the entire AWS account be done by the support team of Citrus.
In order to address the above-mentioned challenges, Citrus Consulting Services configured the monitoring tools to enable 24 * 7 proactive monitoring for break fix and service requests across multiple channels like phone, chat support and email. There were also defined specific SLAs on priority basis with maximum response time of 1 hour whilst maintaining near zero downtime. The implementation of multiple open source and native monitoring tools enhanced measures like security, scalability and availability for Afreximbank. The various levels of automation which was implemented on the AWS infrastructure provisioned elasticity and agility to incorporate multiple service requests and change requests without any downtime or complications which can hinder business performance. Log Monitoring and Analysis were implemented too, to measure the traffic inflow and trace any abnormalities while protecting the entire infrastructure from end to end to ensure highly secure applications.
Managed Services kicked in post the completion of the deployment of resources on AWS along with security tightening. It is an ongoing project with multiple deliverables and services rendered on a daily basis.
The Managed Services rendered by Citrus Consulting Services ensured 100% business continuity for Afreximbank through 24/7 proactive monitoring of resources. The team also achieved 0% penetration points for the application and inline infrastructure. The cost optimization for the resources done using the utilization and wastage tracker was able to optimize the resource costs by almost 30%. The dedicated managed support team enabled Afreximbank for parallel Innovation Engine Developed to enhance infrastructure and optimize the utilization of multiple AWS resources as well.
