IPA Group — From legacy apps to API and DevOps

About IPA Group

IPA Group is the world’s largest SME/SMP professional accountancy group, providing a stronger, more powerful voice for its members and the sector globally.

The foundation of a professional community is a sense of belonging, which facilitates the sharing of diverse knowledge, ideas, and support when you need it most. The IPA Group’s education offering, events, technical support, advocacy platform, and other services exist to strengthen the community and thus their preparedness to improve the quality of life of small business.

Accordingly, their major projects are each focused on fostering connection and engagement within the IPA Group community. These include improvements to ICT to enhance accessibility, communication, and user experience, the reimagining of education to better suit the needs of accountants now and into the future, and the introduction of action plans that aim to promote inclusiveness and equity in the Group and the broader profession.

Introduction

The IPA had its origin over 100 years ago, and after more than a century of sustained growth and international expansion they faced a critical challenge: the need to modernize their legacy technology stack which was hindereding adaptability to modern business needs, resulting in data silos and limiting integration capabilities with other systems. This case study explores the journey of transforming their existing infrastructure, migrating to Microsoft Azure, implementing an API-centric approach, and transitioning from Subversion to Git for source code management to enhance scalability and cross-system communication.

Solution

The proposed solution focused on building a robust API layer to facilitate communication and integration between the existing applications and other systems. Additionally, the migration to Microsoft Azure was recommended to overcome infrastructure limitations and enable a more scalable, secure, and globally accessible environment. Simultaneously, we proposed transitioning from Subversion to Git for enhanced version control and collaboration; allowing us to create an automated Continuous Integration and Continuous Deliver (CI/CD) system built on Microsoft Pipelines.

Implementation

Sudaka Labs designed and crafted new RESTful APIs to enable seamless communication between the various systems and enabling integrations with new third-party platforms. The migration to Microsoft Azure involved transferring code repositories, databases, and application components to leverage Azure's services, optimizing performance and reliability. The transition from Subversion to Git was seamlessly executed, improving code collaboration and facilitating a more flexible development process. Automated pipelines using Azure DevOps were established to facilitate continuous integration and deployment, reducing manual errors and ensuring a faster release cycle.

Results

The API-centric approach significantly improved interoperability, breaking down data silos and enabling seamless communication between the all systems. Azure migration provided a scalable and globally accessible infrastructure, addressing challenges posed by geographical disparities in user locations. The transition to Git enhanced version control, collaboration, and flexibility in managing the source code. Automated pipelines streamlined development and deployment processes, reducing manual effort and ensuring a more reliable and consistent application release.

The modernization of the legacy technology stack marked a transformative journey for the IPA Group, positioning them to meet the evolving demands of the digital landscape and paved the way for future innovations and scalability, ensuring the group's technology infrastructure is aligned with their business objectives.