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Case study

The challenge

One of the world's largest banks wanted to create a private cloud across its six data centers and some of its lab environments. The bank had to overcome several technical challenges, including migrating applications that used a backend Sybase database management system as well as issues with monitoring the migration's progress.

The bank lacked a structured approach and ran into problems with manual workflows and ad hoc communications when it tried to carry out the migration internally. Its line-of-business teams were also reluctant to participate in the transformation program. The bank engaged Cognizant to consolidate its scattered technology footprint, reduce its reliance on legacy applications with security vulnerabilities and categorize nearly 4,000 applications.

Our approach

As part of a multi-vendor team providing migration and application readiness services, Cognizant fully analyzed the bank's application source code before developing a migration strategy and designing a cloud deployment architecture. Our cloud enablement team developed a custom monitoring application for the project management office, free of charge, as well as created and delivered a tailored cloud competency workshop program across customer locations. We used a cloud management platform to abstract dependencies and address application onboarding prerequisites. Our team captured the engagement-specific lessons learned in an operational run book and a guidance document for future reference.

We used various approaches throughout the project to quickly migrate legacy applications under predefined standards. These included a security governance framework using automation scripts, automated infrastructure provisioning and a migration factory methodology. This enabled the assessment and migration of more than 800 applications over three years.

Cloud migration improves time to market

With Cognizant’s help, the bank’s applications are now hosted on a scalable, standardized, secure and highly available cloud architecture. It can ramp up applications faster and deliver products to the market in less time. The bank has minimized its infrastructure footprint by 25%, lowering the total cost of ownership. Our team of specialist consultants also helped reduce migration costs by 20%. We have also been instrumental in reducing cloud ramp-up times by 35%.

800+ applications

migrated to a private cloud

25% reduction

in infrastructure footprint, lowering ownership cost

25% improvement

in productivity with migration tracker system