Provider of mortgage documents and digital signatures says banks and mortgage lenders will follow its move to public cloud.
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eLynx supplies software-as-a-service to 500 banking and mortgage retailers. They depend upon its online document delivery and digital signature collection process for 250,000 mortgage transactions every month.
It can’t provide the voluminous final closing documents, which still require buyers’ inked signatures on paper. Rather, eLynx’s SaaS is utilized by mortgage lenders and related organizations to electronically deliver about 1 million real estate appraisals, mortgage lender disclosure statements, and other documents leading as much as closing every month.
eLynx’s SaaS offers verifiable digital signature capture and document delivery. The legal requirements are stringent; eLynx’s survival depends upon its Expedite platform reliably providing document delivery and signature capture services. Explaining that signatures were lost because of systems outages won’t cut it with its customers.
To avoid this type of possibility, it’s built two highly secure datacenters and network operations centers in Cincinnati and in Beaverton, Ore. Both are monitored and, at any sign of a huge datacenter abnormality, you may failover to any other. Any one failed system might be replaced within a datacenter. Internet congestion points, which would delay document delivery, may be identified and circumvented with an alternate route, said Alan Matuszak, eLynx CTO, in an interview.
[Wish to learn more about using VM migration in disaster recovery? See Hurricane Sandy Lesson: VM Migration Can Stop Outages.]
eLynx have been delivering mortgage documents since 1994, but in 2009 its business growth led it to upgrade its two datacenters for more automated management, using Egenera’s PAN Manager for physical and virtual infrastructure. Matuszak calls it the eLynx private cloud. PAN Manager enables it to offer mortgage lenders a self-service portal and a service catalogue that allows them to select and configure the services they want through a Microsoft Visio-like flowchart.
As its business continues to expand, eLynx doesn’t plan to enlarge its existing datacenters or build another. Actually, it’s already consolidated three datacenters to 2. It’s going to meet future expansion needs by counting on Amazon Web Services to run the Expedite platform, an ability that it already has in place. It’s planning so as to add Rackspace and HP OpenStack clouds within the first 1/2 2014, and Microsoft Azure inside the second half. These public cloud services could be viewed and managed through Egenera’s Cloud Director software, Matuszak said.
“We do not plan so as to add to any extent further servers. We’ll use Amazon or Rackspace. Cloud Director gives us a complete other level of control,” reaching into the general public cloud, he said.
eLynx will first use the general public cloud for development and test, not service delivery. But Matuszak also expects the firm’s SaaS services to head into the cloud, first in a split, hybrid fashion, with some within the firm’s own datacenters and a few within the cloud. “Over the years, our lender customers are becoming more well-off with the assumption of secure operations within the cloud.”
But as eLynx switches from strictly private datacenter operation to a mixture of private and public cloud operations, Matuszak’s staff would be testing the Egenera platform to determine how far it might go. If it may manage cloud servers as an extension of the eLynx datacenter, “I expect someday all of my environments would be within the public cloud,” he said. That implies both test and dev and the SaaS services.
The ability to failover from one site to a different remains important. “The [Cloud Director] disaster recovery feature we purchased allows us to have a procedure where production fails over to a different datacenter, spinning up a similar virtual machines.”
Doing it through automated software procedures is more beneficial than the former, manual processes that were a part of the former disaster recovery approach. “i would not have the ability to do business today without that disaster recovery ability,” said Matuszak.
Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld, and previous technology editor of Interactive Week.
Private clouds are moving rapidly from concept to production. But some fears about expertise and integration still linger. Also within the Private Clouds Step Up issue of InformationWeek: The general public cloud and the steam engine have more in common than it’s possible you’ll think. (Free registration required.)
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