Rely on Amaze^® for Rapid and Cost-efficient Cloud Transformation of Legacy Applications

Cloud transformation of legacy financial applications is always a daunting task, especially when the applications are business-critical. Such a move, though futuristic, is entangled with numerous challenges, both business and technical. Thus, having a realistic cloud transformation strategy in place can be a great game-changer for swift and seamless cloud migration without impacting business-as-usual. Hexaware’s amaze^®for Applications is an intelligent cloud replatforming product suite that indeed changes the game in your favor by not only cloud transforming legacy applications rapidly, but also enabling great TCO reduction of around 50% with 50-70% process automation. Before we get into how this is possible and how we implemented it for a Fortune 500 financial services company with a global presence, let’s understand the key cloud migration challenges and how to plan a cloud journey.

Taking a Stock of the Challenges

There is a big list of the key challenges that an organization needs to handle while taking its critical Java or .NET based complex financial applications to the cloud along with maintaining consistency of operations and business-as-usual.

1. Application-specific Challenges

The first and the foremost one is dealing with global customers while keeping the applications as localized as possible to comply with different languages, customer types, and regulatory needs – how can one change the engine when the flight is in motion!

When we define cloud transformation challenges, we can categorize them in four buckets:

1. Complex ecosystem of applications in a complex financial institution involves COTS product(s) with multiple bespoke applications and/or mix-and-match of legacy and modern applications
2. Technical debt is another concern that needs to be tackled strategically to avoid inconsistencies sometimes before or after the applications are migrated to the cloud. The extent of technical debt depends largely upon the architectural changes made to the application during cloud transformation.
3. Keeping business and technology goals in sync is another roadblock
4. Bringing in the necessary cultural and organizational change with conviction is one of the most critical ones to achieve the cloud migration goals swiftly
5. Lack of documentation regarding business rules and application functionality, and unavailability of SMEs is indeed a discouraging factor in bringing down the confidence in chalking out a cloud transformation strategy

2. Migration-specific Challenges

At times, it becomes tough to decide on which cloud migration strategy to pick from the various options like rehosting, rearchitecting, and replatforming, which can directly impact migration time, costs, and the application’s future-ready capabilities.

Also, before initiating cloud transformation, the organization needs to do an application portfolio analysis and the assessment with variable and weightage to determine the migration plan around the 7Rs which include:

1. Refactor
2. Replatform
3. Repurchase
4. Rehost
5. Relocate
6. Retain
7. Retire

Accordingly, the cloud transformation strategy must be designed. This needs to be combined with proper program governance with concrete goals, timelines, benchmarks, measurements, communication, etc. One caution here is to avoid too much of analysis paralysis and focus on quick and early wins to build experience and business case, and continuously renew the leadership and executive buy-in for a successful launch and implementation.

Why Cloud Transformation with Amaze^® Works Best for Financial Applications?

Any sudden change in the business functionality or management of applications can directly impact user satisfaction and may also violate compliance standards. This can, in turn, give a bad name to the company and can invite fines or penalties if quality, security, or customer service is compromised. Amaze^® is an intelligent cloud transformation platform that can perform rapid and cost-efficient migration of such critical applications by retaining 100% business functionality and ensuring class-leading security and compliance standards.

Also, amaze^® performs the cloud application migration of Java and .NET applications from on-premise to
open-source platforms and databases that are flexible and easy to manage, yet secure. This takes away the headache of licensing costs and complexity in managing applications. This is a big advantage, especially during the challenging pandemic times when teams are working remotely, and operational flexibility and scalability is limited. Legacy application migration to the cloud has become a necessity to attain business agility and continuity, and achieve improved efficiency, scalability, and resilience for legacy on-premise applications. This also, in turn, improves staff efficiency as the teams can now fully focus on development, DevOps, DevSecOps, and support of applications. The target environment can include a hybrid cloud, on-premise, or entirely on the cloud as well.

Furthermore, amaze^® analyzes code patterns and recommends necessary changes on its own. Due to the intelligent AI in pattern recognition, etc., it doesn’t matter if the SMEs who developed the legacy application or the documentation pertaining to the application are available or not.

Also, amaze^® employs maximum automation at all the following stages:

• Analysis (of patterns and code for rehosting, replatforming, macro or micro services, etc.)
• Architecture and design
• Migration and stabilization
• Operationalization

Amaze^® Rapid Cloud Migration Roadmap

Proof-point – Application Cloud Migration for a Fortune 500 Company

Background

The client was a Fortune 500 financial services company (a highly regulated bank) with multi-trillion dollars in assets. With a strong presence in over 25 countries worldwide, the bank’s technology landscape consisted of several COTS products with heavy customization, and legacy applications were based on a modern technology stack. Also, the organization structure was highly decentralized, and this directly impacted business-technology alignment.

Need for Cloud Migration with Amaze^®

• Boost operational resilience and scalability in a very short time
• Reduce TCO, mainly the software and licensing costs, and adopt a pay-as-you-use approach
• Improve business agility and staff productivity
• Improve infrastructure stability
• Handle end-of-life risks
• Migrate from CapEx to OpEx model
• Unavailability of SMEs for the legacy application and lack of documentation increased complexities in managing the application

Our Approach

Amaze^®, with its pre-assessment analysis, could identify the technology and its readiness in terms of rehosting/replatforming these applications to the cloud. We thoroughly assessed the applications by leveraging amaze^® and identified very quickly the changes needed in the patterns and code (the applications contained both Java and .NET code), and automation possibilities. It also helped to plan a cost-efficient strategy for the adoption of machine learning and rapid cloud transformation through replatforming.

Our focus was on achieving the target architecture first and then, apply maximum automation at every stage of migration. The following figure depicts how much % of automation we adopted at which stage.

Key Business Outcomes

• Rapid cloud replatforming in just 8 weeks
• Overall 50-70% automation
• TCO reduction of 50%
• Migration was 50% faster as compared to manual efforts

As Clement Stone once said, “Thinking will not overcome fear, but action will”. So, let’s get started and get into action to plan and execute your cloud transformation journey.