OSV, a leading Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) solutions provider, migrated from Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL Enterprise Edition and improved database performance by 70%, increased system uptime to 100%, and reduced database TCO by 50%.
Introduction & Background
OneSource Virtual (OSV), based in Dallas, Texas, provides full solutions, services, and products exclusively for Workday customers. The company handles the administratively burdensome and specialized functions of payroll, tax, accounts receivable, and accounts payable, freeing Human Resources and Finance departments from repetitive tasks and data processing to focus on strategic growth activities.
Founded in 2008 as a Workday partner, OSV pioneered Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) solutions that enhance and streamline day-to-day administration for improved pay processes, employee management, and financial wellness. Its 900+ customers range from small and medium-sized businesses to organizations with over 100,000 employees. Operating inside its customers’ Workday environments, OSV processes 4 million payroll transactions per month and around 160,000 tax filings per quarter.
Business Challenges & Goals
OSV runs downstream processes from the Workday payroll system, using applications such as Salesforce to handle information in disconnected databases. Application development was split between Salesforce, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL Community Edition. As their number of customers grew, sensitive financial information vital to payment and tax processing resided on a variety of platforms.
To deliver on its BPaaS offering, OSV needed to consolidate data sources in one place. Dissatisfied with database performance, and concerned with governance and compliance, OSV looked for a unified data management platform with high availability, maximum security, and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO).
Business Results & Metrics
After implementing MySQL Enterprise Edition, OSV’s customers and their employees gained a one-stop-shop for accessing all paycheck-related information—including payments, tax filings, health care savings accounts, wage garnishments, earned wage access, and other elements of personal finance visible in real-time through a mobile app. Consolidation of data sources into one database brought significant improvements in performance and cost.
Immediately after the move, database performance increased by 70%, system uptime rose to 100%, and licensing costs dropped by 50% as OSV began to phase out Microsoft SQL Server for app development and began consolidating data sources onto the upgraded MySQL Enterprise Edition database.
The performance increase translated to faster processing of paychecks and tax filings, which are cyclical tasks that must be performed on specific days per month for each customer. Making faster payments and accelerating employment package visibility for the 3 million employees of its client base has allowed OSV to focus their time on building more flexible and sturdy disaster recovery systems as well. Recent cloud based outages like the Microsoft Azure CrowdStrike outage show that relaince on any one data center or cloud provider leaves you vulnerable. The lower TCO of MySQL allowed OSV to add high availability replica databases to an additional data center in case a similar outage were to happen on their cloud provider’s system. With the improvements resulting from adopting MySQL Enterprise Edition, OSV now makes critical tax filings on the 23rd day of each month, rather than on the last day of the month and each quarter.
MySQL Enterprise Edition has reduced TCO by 50%, and is deployed across all its environments, including test, development, quality assurance, production, non-production, and disaster recovery. Developers report satisfaction in working with an instance of identical size to the production database due to use of MySQL De-Identification.
By consolidating databases with different functions into a single repository, MySQL Enterprise Edition has become the linchpin of OSV’s microservices architecture, giving the company the flexibility to move processes from different parts of the system to others, spinning up or breaking out databases and servers at will. “MySQL is just easier to work with, easier to move data, to combine and recombine things, and to look at different ways to package our data and the software that uses it. It’s given us more flexibility than a large SQL server or a Salesforce instance that we don't have as much control over,” commented Joe Disharoon.
On the security front, OSV guarantees its customers peace of mind by encrypting and anonymizing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) contained in bank payments and other money movements. By leveraging MySQL Enterprise Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and MySQL Enterprise Masking and De-identification, the company complies with every regulatory requirement and data privacy law that requires data de-identification. “Encryption is easy to maintain and audit with MySQL Enterprise Edition”, states Joe Disharoon.
MySQL encryption and data masking has significantly reduced the risk of data breach, and also enabled confidential production data to be safely used for development, testing, and analytics. In the new high-availability environment, no data breach has been reported since going live. OSV continually delivers on its service level agreements, and is in a stronger position than ever to continue as their customer base grows.
For the OSV technology teams, the encryption and masking capabilities provide the flexibility to focus on their main Workday-related business. The teams are supported by MySQL solution architects who continually fine-tune the security and high availability infrastructure of MySQL Enterprise Edition.
Why MySQL Enterprise Edition?
OSV needed a high-performance database for collecting datasets from disparate sources. Given the sensitive payments information handled by the company, that database would have to offer a very simple way to encrypt and mask payment-related data. The company decided that MySQL Enterprise Edition delivered more powerfully on this use case than any competing database solution.