Talentsoft simplifies and optimizes operations in the cloud with F5

Talentsoft, Europe’s leading cloud-based talent management and learning software provider, needed to scale its IT operations to meet ambitious global expansion goals. With an F5 solution implemented across private cloud, data centers and Microsoft Azure, it was able to provide 9 million users across 130 countries software access on any device, from any location.

Business Challenges

Talentsoft’s expansion plans were potentially facing a slowdown as bandwidth and access issues were starting to negatively impact the customer experience. Furthermore, the need to manually update server configurations resulted in spiraling costs and ballooning time commitments from staff.

With an existing hybrid cloud model, including private cloud data centers and Microsoft Azure, Talentsoft was centrally managing its various cloud-based applications. It also needed to quickly send client requests to available servers and ensure it could handle increasing amounts of customer traffic. The challenge was exacerbated by the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which massively increased the pressure to meet complex in-country data privacy and security regulations for customer data.

“Talentsoft’s digital transformation roadmap calls for ambitious global expansion, which means we needed a scalable hybrid cloud infrastructure,” said Julien Villemeur, DevOps and cloud infrastructure director, Talentsoft. “We also needed to bring together the Networking (NetOps), Security (SecOps) and Developer (DevOps) teams to rapidly prototype, test, and launch new solutions that can enhance our talent management software offering.”

Solution

Talentsoft turned to F5 Networks and channel partner Quadria to accelerate and add heft to its digital transformation plans. It replaced the company’s existing manual server configuration process by deploying the F5® VIPRION® platform with virtualized load balancers.

Talentsoft’s talent management applications are now virtualized across a hybrid cloud environment, spanning multiple regions, in-country private cloud data centers and the Azure public cloud. F5 has helped to standardize applications across all of Talentsoft’s data centers around the world.

“Microsoft Azure is now an extension of our datacenters. All of our datacenters are interconnected and communicate with each other to make administration and management easier to our teams,” explained Julien Leger, Cloud Services Manager, Talentsoft.

In order to keep its customers up-to-date with the latest talent management software, Talentsoft uses  F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management  to gain deep, real-time visibility across its applications, networks, and servers. This helps Talentsoft simplify application management and load-balance its servers, maintain compliance with in-country data privacy regulations and deliver applications securely and effectively. Using BIG-IQ, Talentsoft gains full visibility of all of its F5 solutions and applications—including those deployed on Azure--from a single console. Talentsoft’s IT staff are saving significant amounts of time by no longer having to manually configure and provision servers and can focus on bringing the DevOps, NetOps, SecOps teams together to drive digital business innovation.

“With the ability to analyze traffic and application data in real-time, Talentsoft can ensure its applications are running without bandwidth or latency issues. If there are bandwidth issues with a down server, Talentsoft can automatically distribute traffic to another server to provide its customers with a reliable user experience,” said Christophe Maloungila, DevOps Architect, Talentsoft.