THE CVC Corp is one of the largest travel groups in Latin America, with brands that operate in Brazil, Argentina and the United States, in the segments of vacation and leisure, corporate/business, education (cultural exchange abroad), management and rental of residences (in the USA and Brazil).

In October 2021, CVC suffered a cybernetic incident that, despite being efficiently resolved, shed light on the need to migrate its on-premises environment to the cloud. Also because, at the time of the attack, the company was already testing a PoC (Proof-of-Concept) of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and the database hosted in Oracle's cloud environment was completely preserved from invasion, thanks to its security features. 

In addition to the cyber incident, the company also suffered from unavailability and connection problems dammed in its data centers, which paralyzed the environments and generated unavailability in the entire chain of stores of the group, as well as its e-commerce, affecting the experience of the customer and impacting sales. 

In this way, CVC's infrastructure team - together with the consultancy V8.TECH  and Oracle – created an ambitious migration project for OCI, which should be done in the shortest possible time, without compromising the company's operations. 

Why CVC chose Oracle

CVC was already familiar with Oracle's solutions, as it had been using Exadata in its on-premise environment for several years. Both Sistour (CVC's core system for B2C) and Trend (core B2B system) ran on machines 

The company migrated its machines to models like the XCC and later to the CS, always in a process of hardware evolution. From there, the migration to OCI emerged as a natural movement. 

“The migration to OCI promises to reduce CVC infrastructure costs by up to 75% in the medium term. To upgrade our entire data center park, the Infrastructure team calculated that we would spend around R$ 90 million over the next three years. With our Oracle cloud systems, we estimate this cost could be R$ 21 million over the same period”. Rodrigo Costa Silva, IT Infrastructure Manager, CVC

But before migrating to Oracle's cloud, CVC tested a PoC with some of its databases running on OCI. The idea was to validate the processes at the end of the business (that is, in the group's stores), checking the execution time in operations considered problematic - such as the user's screen, queries and reports - and comparing the results in relation to the on-premises . And all these processes running in the cloud showed, on average, 70% of performance improvement.

Results
One of CVC's main gains with the migration of its systems to OCI was performance. In the on-premise environment, the salesperson at one of the group's stores took up to thirty minutes to close an order. Now, it takes, on average, about nine minutes for the same process. That is, a performance gain of 70%, in which it can dedicate more time to serving other clients. 
This performance improvement optimized the seller's day-to-day life, with emphasis on progress in the payment confirmation process. On the operational side, CVC was able to download more receipts from the cashier in a short period of time, enabling faster release of the other stages of the reservation, such as issuing the voucher.

This performance improvement optimized the seller's day-to-day life, with emphasis on progress in the payment confirmation process. On the operational side, CVC was able to download more receipts from the cashier in a short period of time, enabling faster release of the other stages of the reservation, such as issuing the voucher.

“We consolidated all Oracle databases from CVC OnPremise into OCI, and, as happened at POC, the latency between these two environments did not impact the business at all”, explains Rodrigo Regente, Business Development Director at V8.TECH, the implementation partner responsible for the migration project. “The migration even considerably increased the performance of CVC's technological environment as a whole, with average gains in the order of 66% in its response time”, he adds.

Another gain related to performance was in the monthly accounting closing. In the on-premise environment, this operation took hours to perform. Now, CVC employees can complete that same operation in minutes. When the company's accounting department needed to condense the stores' results the next day, the numbers were available right away, without delay. 

The migration to OCI also promises to reduce CVC's infrastructure costs by up to 75% in the medium term. This is because to update its entire data center park (upgrade of hardware, licenses, etc.), the Infrastructure team calculated that it would spend around R$ 90 million over the next three years. With its systems in the Oracle cloud, experts estimate this cost could be R$ 21 million over the same period. 

Implementation

With Oracle partner support, V8.TECH, an integrator specialized in digital technologies, CVC migrated its infrastructure from the on premise model to the public cloud, with OCI, in just three months (six months between planning and execution). 

For the migration not to interfere in the progress of the business, the V8.TECH made a plan to organize the migration in waves, where each one represented a number of databases that should be migrated and organized according to their criticality, dependence on other bases and possibility of downtime. As a result, a safe migration was carried out with the least possible impact on the day-to-day activities of the company. The company prioritized the migration of its B2B system (Trend), which served as a learning process. Next, it was the turn of the B2C system (Sistour), whose process was more fluid. 

The connectivity of the operational infrastructure with OCI, already at the POC, was another important point, because at the time of migration, everything was already configured, tested and working, saving a lot of time on the project.