Eurasian Resources Group

ESG’s hybrid-cloud solution supports ambitious digitalization initiatives, making public services more accessible and efficient.

Download the Case Study

CUSTOMERS / GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC SERVICES

Eurasian Resources Group

Modern hybrid-cloud infrastructure transforms how people access public services in Kazakhstan

By building a modern hybrid-cloud infrastructure that keeps sensitive data secure and sovereign, ERG’s digital startups are improving life for everyday citizens.

Mining and raw materials company Eurasian Resources Group (ERG) is dedicated to improving access to public services in areas where it operates, including Kazakhstan.

Partially owned by the government of Kazakhstan, ERG strives to support projects that create positive social impact.

Recognizing the importance of digital services in improving interactions with the government, the company decided to transform the digital experience for Kazakhstanis, creating social impact startups like Smart Cities and BTS Digital.

Since its founding in 2018, BTS Digital has helped improve quality of life for Kazakhstanis by developing digital services that make it easier to do transactions with government agencies. These solutions were a lifeline to critical public services and enabled access to financial assistance during the COVID-19 crisis.

The challenge

In its first five years of operations, BTS Digital has pursued a range of projects from online payments to digital identification and a platform for submitting requests to government offices. To support these ambitious projects, Korobitsin’s team needed a modern hybrid-cloud infrastructure that could scale to support rapid growth and expansion.

With the goal of improving digital experiences to deliver public services and modern conveniences to citizens of Kazakhstan, BTS Digital sought out:

A powerful and scalable compute infrastructure
A secure, high-performance on-premises storage solution with S3 protocol

After careful evaluation of multiple proposals, Korobitsin’s team decided to combine a Hewlett Packard Enterprise platform with AMD EPYC processors + Scality software-defined object storage for backups.



“Almost everyone in Kazakhstan has a smartphone, just like in many parts of the world. For ERG, this presents an opportunity to make people’s lives better by digitalizing public services and making them accessible via mobile phones.”

Sergey Korobitsin

Server infrastructure, virtualization, and cloud team lead, Smart Cities*

* Smartcities is a startup of ERG’s venture fund responsible for managing all IT infrastructures and data centers across the fund’s portfolio of startups, including BTS Digital

The outcome

The company’s HPE infrastructure currently supports two clouds: a private one for ERG’s ecosystem of startups, plus a public one accessible to Kazakhstani customers.

Now able to rapidly deploy OpenStack cloud computing on-premises, BTS Digital has accelerated the development, testing, staging, and production of various projects. This performance has enabled BTS Digital to expand its digital services far more quickly.

For instance, more than 2.5 million citizens have used its unified system eOtinish to file and track claims, complaints, and requests with government agencies. The company’s digital identification service, called Digital ID, now has over 6 million users. Rolling out these services wouldn’t have been possible without their modern hybrid-cloud environment.

For backup storage, BTS Digital adopted HPE Apollo 4200 Systems with Scality RING software to create object storage on-premises with native S3 API protocol — which is key for keeping sensitive data secure and sovereign.

Scality RING enables the team to easily store backups of virtual machines in OpenStack and scale as needed to support future workloads. Now BTS Digital’s DevOps engineers can step up development while efficiently managing their growing volumes of data.

As BTS Digital pursues more digitalization projects, including those focused on AI and Big Data, Korobitsin’s team expects its hybrid cloud to support more virtualization and other workloads while ensuring maximum levels of security.



“We serve requests for compute and storage power faster than before. In our traditional architecture, we would take up to 30 minutes to complete requests for virtual machines. Now it takes only one to two minutes, with no cloud operator involved. Productivity has improved because the infrastructure doesn’t take much time to maintain and allows us to go faster.”

Sergey Korobitsin

Infrastructure section manager, Smart Cities



“Many storage solutions offered us S3 compatibility in the wrong way. Most of them said they could also store our backups in Amazon. But we needed storage using S3 protocol on our premises because our security requirements don’t allow us to store anything in a public cloud. Scality provided the solution that we needed.”

Sergey Korobitsin

Infrastructure section manager, Smart Cities



“We deployed the solution to cover our growing requirements for compute and storage power. With it, we’re confident we can continue to grow and create a greater social impact in Kazakhstan.”

Sergey Korobitsin

Infrastructure section manager, Smart Cities