About the client
Industry:Banking & FSI
Location:Singapore & Malaysia
A leading financial services agency, the customer offers a comprehensive portfolio of credit risk management solutions and services to top banking and financial institutions, insurance and telecommunication companies, large corporations, SMEs, legal firms as well as statutory bodies.
The organization maintained a robust on-premises IT infrastructure distributed across two data centres, balancing homegrown and legacy applications. To optimize operational efficiency and ensure reliability, they hosted their environment in a colocation data centre. Despite grappling with legacy systems, the customer remained proactive in continuous technology refresh cycles to stay abreast of evolving industry standards.
As part of its commitment to offering the best of the best in services and solutions, the organization had lined up a shift from its traditional on-premises IT infrastructure to one that would leverage the public cloud and usher in a phase of digital transformation. With recent acquisitions of several regional fintech companies and strategic partnerships with other fintech platforms in the works, they would benefit from the business agility, data visualization and analytics capabilities, and the quicker go-to-market that a modern backbone would bring. And so began the search for the right partner for this cloud journey.
Challenge
Wrangling CAPEX/OPEX & building for the future
The existing legacy applications were not able to match up to the new business requirements of the customer. The infrastructure footprint – albeit a robust on-premise presence in two locations – and legacy systems had their limitations.
The credit reporting agency wanted to get better control on its CAPEX and OPEX costs, improve technology refresh cycles, and meet its ESG (environmental, social and governance) goals. These were proving to be a challenge with the existing setup. A modern cloud-based setup would also offer better business agility, time-to-market, data visualization capabilities, besides helping bring efficient cost management.
They were looking to chart an IT roadmap and set up infrastructure to meet its needs on both capacity and performance for the next five years. The goal of the digital transformation was to support innovation and meet new business requirements alongside meeting governance and compliance norms. The AWS Cloud, known for its popularity in delivering comprehensive solutions, was the obvious choice. They now required a partner with a solid track record to execute and build on this cloud journey and Cloud Kinetics fit the bill. Cloud Kinetics has over a decade-long association with AWS as a strategic partner and has delivered 100+ AWS Customer launches and worked with 200+ customers on AWS.
Solution
A full-fledged digital transformation roadmap
Levelling up with AWS
Cloud Kinetics, as engagement partner, had to support the customer through the migration to AWS, document the cloud journey and prepare the roadmap. The team first came up with an assessment report that would guide the migration of the on-premises workload to the cloud infrastructure. In addition, the team also offered recommendations on the latest industry-standard cloud architecture during the entire engagement period, enabling the customer to make informed decisions that would offer business benefits and give them a digital edge.
The scope of engagement included:
- AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) to expedite the migration process
- Mapping and supporting the cloud journey for actual DC exit
- AWS Outpost for data residency
- Application modernization
- Automation in deployment
- FinOps-led approach for optimization and efficiency, to bring down TCO
Intel instances deliver transformative value
The compatible Intel instances on the AWS Cloud versus on-premises helped deliver value at every stage of the cloud journey through cloud optimization.
- Workload benchmarking: Recommends best AWS instances for heterogeneous workloads and instance right sizing.
- Performance support tools: Intel “cookbooks” help to showcase how workloads can be optimized in the cloud
- Workload optimizer: Helps optimize cloud instances and container resources
- M7i-flex and M7i instances: Next-generation purpose instances powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, exclusive to AWS. They feature a 4:1 ratio of memory to vCPU and offer price-performance benefits for workloads that need larger instance sizes.
Success Metrics
Migration marks the beginning of bigger things
After the digital transformation, the customer team noted significant strides on the operational excellence and staff productivity front. The organization also saw a savings in Total Cost of Ownership of AWS Cloud. With data consolidation, processes became more streamlined and ensured decision-makers across the organization were on the same page with a single data source/view. The enhanced visualization eased decision-making and laid the ground for quicker GTM and supported innovation across the board.
The Intel instances have helped improve cloud performance and reduced cloud TCO. M7i-flex instances, powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, have provided the easiest way to get price performance and lower prices for the majority of general-purpose workloads.
Overall highlights include:
- Improvement in scalability
- Improvement in staff productivity
- Savings in terms of Total Cost of Ownership of AWS Cloud
- Improvement in operational excellence
- Quicker go-to-market (GTM)
Partnering for the future
Going forward, a DC exit strategy is on the cards to mark a complete migration of all data, applications, and infrastructure to the public cloud on AWS. This will be in tandem with the charting and execution of a cloud adoption framework. Application modernization and new app development are also lined up. Work on a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) has already begun and will ensure that the agency is always up-to-date and leveraging the latest solutions and best practices in the field. Both the customer and Cloud Kinetics are optimistic about the road ahead.
