Mexican Housing Agency Improves Service

Reliability, Trims IT Costs by Moving to Cloud

Customer: Registro nico de Vivienda

Website: www.ruv.org.mx
Customer Size: 70 employees
Country or Region: Mexico
Industry: Public works & services
Customer Profile
Registro nico de Vivienda is Mexicos
National Housing Registry, which collects
data on all aspects of the countrys
housing industry and helps government
and private industry provide needed
housing.
Software and Services
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure Storage
Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
Windows Server 2012 R2
Microsoft SQL Server 2012
Microsoft System Center 2012 R2

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Never before have we had the level of availability for

our services that Azure provides. We have dramatically
reduced downtime, which is critical in keeping the
Mexican housing industry productive.
Aida Roel, Chief Executive Officer, Registro nico de Vivienda

Registro nico de Vivienda (RUV) gathers and provides data on

all aspects of Mexicos housing industry for the government,
builders, banks, urban planners, and others. To improve the
reliability and scalability of its online data services, RUV has
moved them to Microsoft Azure. RUV now provides more
reliable data services and can scale infrastructure to precisely
meet its needs. It has also reduced IT costs by 65 percent.
Business Needs
Registro nico de Vivienda (RUV) is
Mexicos National Housing Registry,
created in 2004 for the purpose of
improving the efficiency of the Mexican
housing industry through process
automation and business intelligence. RUV
gathers and analyzes information on home
construction and sales, monitors housing
supply and demand, sets construction
standards and price benchmarks, and
assists the federal government in
determining and distributing housing
subsidies.
Its extensive data on all aspects of housing
in Mexico maximizes the productivity of
the housing sector, contributes to housing
policy, improves urban planning, and helps
government agencies understand housing

trends and needs across the country. RUV

makes its data available to constituents
homebuilders, government agencies,
banks, urban planners, and othersas
online web services. RUV is located in
Mexico City and employs 70 people.
RUV maintains a massive housing
registration database that contains millions
of records and grows by half a million new
registrations each year. It also maintains
several smaller databases that contain
geographical information and business
intelligence data. As its data stores and
number of constituents expanded, the RUV
began to experience reliability and
scalability challenges. All of its applications
and data ran on five large servers at a
hosting facility, but the servers were
overloaded and at capacity. At busy times

when, for example, builders logged in at

month end to provide construction status
information, the RUV servers would slow
and sometimes fail.
When our servers collapsed, our services
were unavailable, which was unacceptable,
says Aida Roel, Chief Executive Officer of
Registro nico de Vivienda. Construction
projects all over the country could be
stalled, and construction is an important
industry in Mexico that employs a lot of
people. Even when services were available,
performance and application stability
problems hampered use. The registry also
had no disaster recovery setup; if anything
catastrophic happened to its hosting facility,
all RUV services would be at risk.
In 2012, the RUV was asked to add federal
housing subsidy information to its
databases. In 2014, it was asked to also add
home loan financial information. We would
have had to greatly expand our IT
infrastructure to handle this increased data
and usage load, but we didnt have the time
or budget to do so, Roel says. We needed
a new IT paradigm that would allow us to
grow the business, meet peak use periods,
and develop new services quickly without
breaking our budget.

Solution
Registro nico de Vivienda had already
created a small development and test
environment in Microsoft Azure and made
the decision to move all of its IT assets,
including production applications and
databases, into the cloud service. Microsoft
Azure is a cloud platform that provides ondemand compute, storage, and networking
capabilities to host, scale, and manage web
applications from Microsoft datacenters.
We liked the ability that Azure gave us to
scale both vertically and horizontallyto
add host servers and virtual machines within
host servers, says Francisco Enciso, IT
Director at Registro nico de Vivienda.
Azure gave us the ability to segregate
workloads in individual virtual machines,

which improved performance and stability.

It also gave us the flexibility to expand
compute and storage cost-effectively and
to develop a cost-effective disaster
recovery infrastructure.
RUV moved its housing registration and
other databases and all of its web-based
applications into Azure, running in an
infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
environment on Microsoft Azure Virtual
Machines and Microsoft Azure Storage. It
has separate Azure IaaS environments for
development, quality assurance, and
production. SAP Business One is the only
application left at the hosting facility, and
it will soon be moved to Azure, too.
All virtual machines run the Windows
Server 2012 R2 operating system, and
databases run Microsoft SQL Server 2012
database software. RUV uses Microsoft
System Center 2012 R2 Operations
Manager to monitor its Azure
environment.
RUV is redesigning all of its Java-based
applications to run with the Microsoft .NET
Framework and, when done, will port them
from the Azure IaaS environment to the
Azure platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
environment. Moving our developers to
Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 and Visual
Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 are
part of a bigger strategy to improve our
design methodology, says Victor
Guerrero, IT Architect at Registro nico de
Vivienda.

Benefits
By using Azure, Registro nico de Vivienda
has greatly improved the availability and
performance of its services and the
scalability of its infrastructure while
reducing IT costs by 65 percent.
Improve Service Availability and
Performance
RUV recently conducted customer
satisfaction surveys with its constituents,
who knew nothing of its migration to

This case study is for informational purposes only.

MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published September 2014

Azure, and all said that RUV services had

greatly improved (customer perception
scores on site availability grew from 7.4 to
8.2 on a scale of 1 to 10). Never before
have we had the level of availability for our
services that Azure provides, Roel says.
We have dramatically reduced downtime,
which is critical in keeping the Mexican
housing industry productive. Our
applications are also much more stable,
which means that constituents experience
faster, more reliable transactions.
RUV will soon create a disaster recovery
environment in Azure, which will provide
additional peace of mind. If a server is
damaged or a disaster occurs in Mexico
City, RUV services will continue to run
without interruption from Azure
datacenters in other regions.
Scale Infrastructure to Precisely Match
Business Needs
RUV gained the scalability it needs to add
services, constituents, and data without IT
infrastructure constraints or worries. We
finally have room to grow, Enciso says.
We can customize Azure resources to our
needs, scaling servers up or down
depending on traffic so that we are not
paying for resources we arent using. We
can also develop applications fasterId
say in half the time we could before
which enables us to deliver new housing
services faster.
Reduce IT Costs by 65 Percent
RUV also reduced its IT costs by 65
percent. It was paying US$900,000 a year
on hosting costs; its now paying $310,000
a year for more servers in Azure. The
great thing is that theres been no tradeoff
between quality and price; weve been able
to improve our infrastructure quality while
saving money, Roel says. As a nonprofit,
were able to invest these savings in
additional applications and improved
customer service.