“Digital modernization” is the catch-all phrase representing the change from the product-focused business model of the last century to the more digital services-facing world of today. Network infrastructure plays a key role in this transition, turning from a static, fixed resource to a more flexible entity capable of serving a wide variety of needs at a moment’s notice.
Recently, a large national services provider managing more than 50 million loans from its headquarters in Cincinnati found that its aging infrastructure was no longer able to keep up with the demands of modern finance. In addition, the burdens of maintenance and upkeep for legacy systems were becoming too much to bear, both financially and in terms of time and effort.
The company has an AWS public cloud-first strategy but taking advantage of all of the services and features can be a challenge for a busy IT team. With CBTS’ help, however, the firm was able to implement a state-of-the-art cloud environment capable of handling even the most complex workloads at extreme scale, all while reducing operating budgets, improving security, and delivering on a wide range of additional goals and objectives. CBTS began by conducting an in-depth analysis to document existing application dependencies, as well as identify the company’s unique system requirements and operational procedures. One of the key advantages of cloud services, powered on AWS, is that they can be easily configured to the client’s business objectives, providing a smooth transition from legacy infrastructure to a more streamlined, forward-leaning ecosystem.
Within three months, CBTS had developed a roadmap and communications plan to coordinate the phasing out of old infrastructure and migration to the new environment. This included the development of a cloud-based disaster recovery environment, as well as a full suite of security precautions to mitigate risk to critical data.
With this in place, CBTS then oversaw the transition to the new environment. Ultimately, nearly 600 end-of-life servers were decommissioned, along with 468 databases and 164 applications. More than 30 applications were migrated to AWS within the first year, averaging one app every two weeks, and more than 25 OS versions were consolidated down to two standard AWS versions. Overall, more than 14,000 lines of code had to be written to pull the environment together.
The end result is a streamlined, modernized ecosystem that reduced the client’s data center footprint by 50 percent and vastly cut the cost of IT and the management burden on existing staff. Significant savings were realized through the elimination of underutilized hardware and reductions in application licensing costs.
Meanwhile, the firm benefits from a dramatically improved security posture based on a Well-Architected Framework design featuring the latest in both threat detection and damage reduction, all of which is incorporated into the overall operating cost of the environment with little to no direct responsibility for patches and upgrades on the client.
In terms of normal operations, the environment is designed for an Infrastructure-as-Code model in which virtualized resources are made available through an automated process that masks the normal provisioning and mapping procedures under layers of abstraction. In this way, the client is able to define the business objectives of their IT needs while CBTS takes on the responsibility of matching the right technology, which ultimately provides a repeatable and auditable infrastructure that is less prone to errors and delivers consistent and measurable outcomes.
Many organizations—particularly those that have established their own private clouds—no doubt feel that migrating to AWS is a simple procedure, and in many ways it is. But the challenge going forward is not simply to outsource to the cloud but to devise a cloud environment that leverages the vast services and automation capabilities within the public cloud.
For that, the assistance of an Advanced AWS provider with a Well-Architected program can be essential in achieving success. Through careful planning and coordinated execution, modern enterprises can leverage CBTS and AWS to support their existing tools and skillsets even as longer-term plans are being developed to address the challenges inherent in the next-generation digital economy.
To learn how CBTS can help with your digital transition, visit the Cloud Solutions on AWS resource.
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