SENCE adopts Azure Cloud and provides efficient service in employment subsidies

The National Training and Employment Service (SENCE, for its acronym in Spanish) is a technical agency of the Chilean government, which has been working since 1976 to improve employability and enhance the professional careers of citizens through various policies, programs, and mechanisms. SENCE focuses on the employed, unemployed and those who are outside the labor market, with the purpose of supporting vulnerable people with their labor market insertion and continuity.

During the pandemic, the government, through the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Labor, developed a public policy plan with two objectives: first, to provide a direct benefit to citizens to boost their search for employment and, second, to encourage companies to expand their workforce and, thus, increase the country’s productivity.

Consequently, a mechanism called employment subsidies was created, for which SENCE was to ensure effective implementation and operation.

A solution capable of supporting the demands of millions of citizens

SENCE was aware that to handle the expected level of demand and application load, there was no other way but to use cloud solutions. “It was foreseen that it would be a subsidy with a high volume of applicants and that the available technology and infrastructure would not be able to support high levels of demand,” said Gonzalo Vera, Head of the IT Department at SENCE.

Given this demand, SENCE chose Microsoft services and solutions and, together with Datco, a Microsoft partner, they worked to migrate its services to the cloud and to develop a cloud tool that would allow them to serve the millions of citizens who would apply for the subsidy. “Until then, we had been using unit applications, all included in the same component,” said Javier Molina, Development and Project Manager at SENCE. “Since then, we changed the development paradigm and started working with decoupled solutions, adding Azure resources at every step,” he added.

What SENCE did then was to decouple the application and subsequent processes of requirements, calculations, and payments, and to work with static websites. Following the recommendations of Microsoft, they moved from .Net Framework to .Net Core, an open source, high-performance, cross-platform framework that aims to build modern, internet-connected, cloud-enabled applications. “Thanks to this service, we improved the way in which the resources that are allocated are used, thus achieving significant savings,” Molinas said.

In addition, Azure App Service was used to define and orchestrate secure, automatic, load-balanced scaling based on certain parameters to ensure operational continuity of the site. With this service, citizens applying for the subsidy would have the website always available, free of crashes due to high demand.   In turn, all the information that the person enters in the web portal request is quickly resolved with Azure Queue Storage, a service for storing large amounts of messages, and then consumed through Function Apps, a solution that provides the context for executing individual functions.

Similarly, Azure SQL was also adopted as the database, so 100% of the solution is in the Microsoft Cloud. “Using Azure is key to not suffering any performance issues regardless of the number of connected users,” Molina said. “Previously, when there was an embedded solution, you had to upload the full resources of that instance. Today we can do it individually, which translates into cost savings,” he added.

Another benefit that SENCE found in having decoupled components has to do with software maintenance. Molina said that “as each one is independent, any change or repair is specific.” He added: “As we keep changing authorities and bringing out new products, we get to a level of development that allows us to take these parts separately and use them where they are needed.”

The benefits of a cloud solution

To date, SENCE has received three million applications for the subsidy, and operates a total of four subsidies with parallel solutions, which means between five and seven million applicants. Due to the success of the implementation of the cloud solution, SENCE migrated all its operations to Azure. Today it is one of the few public institutions in Chile to have its entire infrastructure in the cloud.

For Vera, the success of the implementation is measured by not having received any criticism. “Being a service for citizens, not having received any complaints about the system from subsidy applicants is the best feedback,” he said.

He also emphasized that one of the biggest benefits is the confidence that Azure now supports its architecture: “Microsoft ensures that services are always operational, and we can focus solely on IT solutions.” Likewise, he also values the ease of access to different solutions through the Azure Marketplace. “Today there are a lot of solutions that can be easily acquired, reducing management time and costs, with high security standards.”

A future of efficiency

SENCE took a big step in its digital transformation path. For the future, they will continue to develop their infrastructure to optimal levels, in order to be more efficient and reach all devices with a fast and lightweight solution.

“I would like to highlight and thank the willingness of the Microsoft team, our relationship with Datco, and the contribution of SENCE employees, such as Cristian Venegas and Raúl Díaz,” concluded Gonzalo Vera, Head of the IT Department at SENCE. It is a true example of collaboration.