M and M Business Solutions (M and M Business), a consulting firm, will be using IBM Cloud as it strengthens its financial services offerings and improves customer service experience for micro, small and medium clients.

As it adopts IBM’s hybrid cloud solutions, the consulting firm will be able to eliminate frequent service timeouts as well as billing issues. These factors affected its operational and revenue performance reporting a loss of $700 in revenue per hour per transaction.
VP of M and M Business Solutions.

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The company turned to IBM Cloud to help it address these issues through the provision of a consumption-basis cloud model that allows its clients to smoothly transact with them avoiding loss of revenue. It also allows M and M Business Solutions to scale up applications on-demand in the future, without the need to purchase and physically install new computing capacity or to overprovision hardware to manage peak traffic periods.

“Migrating to IBM Cloud has helped us to resolve our longstanding technical and billing concerns,” said Michael Lim, VP of M and M Business Solutions.

M and M Business started as a tax services company in 1987 and evolved its portfolio to offer a broad range of business solutions — accounting, invoicing, payroll processing, project management, among others — catering to micro and SMBs.

“We are (now) able to do things we couldn’t do before such as free-up resources to focus on services that differentiate our business rather than on traditional, mundane infrastructure services,” said Lim. “We can now create value for our clients and provide them with cost-effective and flexible financial services and business solutions that are easily accessible anytime, anywhere. Best of all, we now have the capability to create new and innovative offerings that can help our partner-clients future-proof their business.”

Lift and shift

IBM has implemented a “lift and shift” solution to easily migrate the company’s systems to IBM public cloud — a relatively fast, cost-effective, and minimally disruptive way to modernize applications. Lifting and shifting to IBM public cloud provides M and M Business Solutions with improved performance as its applications can now run on its existing hardware, without the need for them to invest in additional infrastructure.

A key consideration for clients to migrate to IBM Cloud is to enhance their cloud security services, such as role-based access control, multifactor authentication, and unified hybrid security processes. IBM public cloud is powered by the same industry-leading confidential computing security found in IBM Z. Delivered via IBM Hyper Protect Services, it features ‘Keep Your Own Key’ encryption capabilities backed by the highest level of security certification commercially available, making it a robust platform for companies in highly regulated industries including financial services.

By taking a hybrid approach to modernizing its applications, the company will also be able to reduce its on-premise data center costs and issues, enabling it to scale down its on-premises infrastructure costs related to management and maintenance. Lift and shift solution provides an easy way for clients like M and M Business Solutions to move applications most ready and best suited to a private or public cloud while they continue to host other applications workloads on-premises. With the proper management tools, it can manage the platforms together as a single, optimized infrastructure.