Financial Services Firm Modernizes Front Office With AWS Migration
To remain competitive and maintain customer loyalty, this leader in retirement and wealth investment sought to improve application scalability and delivery while reducing costs.
NTT DATA assessed the firm’s application portfolio, identifying an ideal migration and modernization path for its front office applications. With an application migration factory and cloud accelerators, it rehosted 43 applications and rearchitected 12 to take advantage of cloud-native microservices with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Business Needs
A leading U.S.-based retirement and wealth investment management company wanted to modernize and migrate its applications. As one of the largest asset managers in the world, the company saw innovative FinTech start-ups beginning to erode business. It needed to quickly pivot to protect its market position and ensure customer loyalty.
To achieve these goals, the firm wanted to improve its application scalability and delivery speed while maintaining a high level of quality. Simultaneously, it sought to decrease its data center footprint and operational costs.
Having a solid working relationship with NTT DATA, the firm knew it could count on a company that has superior cloud expertise and deep understanding of its business. NTT DATA quickly formed a team comprised of subject matter experts from across wealth, data, analytics, customer experience and cloud transformation to begin work.
Outcomes
55 Front office apps are migrated
70% Pipelines are automated
- Accelerates departure from data center
- Achieves 19% efficiency gains
- Brings new capabilities to market faster for greater competitive advantage
- Reduces data center costs and mainframe MIPS consumption by one-third
Solution
The AWS migration helped the company reduce its data center costs and mainframe MIPS consumption by one-third.
Getting started
In collaboration with the client’s business and IT teams, NTT DATA performed an in-depth application portfolio analysis. The review assessed 180 applications to determine the best modernization and migration approach for each. From the application portfolio, it was determined that 55 front office applications would be migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Twelve of these applications were identified as ideal candidates for AWS-based microservices modernization.
Migration factory
To speed time to market, NTT DATA harnessed the AWS migration factory. The team worked to identify common patterns across the client’s 55 front office applications and built a factory to create the infrastructure and DevOps pipelines based on these unique patterns. Using these patterns, the factory automates the migration process, securely migrating and deploying the applications into AWS.
By combining the right team with tools like AWS CloudFormation and managed services components such as AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, AWS Data Pipeline and AWS Glue, NTT DATA streamlined the migration process, helping vacate the client’s data center.
Cloud transformation accelerators
Foundational to the migration factory is NTT DATA’s Build Cloud Foundations service, a solution that provides a secure, scalable and unified AWS landing zone foundation constructed with cloud best practices. Built using AWS Control Tower to enable consistent and secure account provisioning, the Build Cloud Foundations service provides for stable, scalable application migration.
The Build Cloud Foundations service enhances account security monitoring with AWS Security Hub and Amazon GuardDuty and deploys Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) alongside AWS Config to detect and alert to guardrail violations. Together these services help ensure visibility of system security and the ability to act on potential issues for the financial service provider. Last, NTT DATA’s Build Cloud Foundations for AWS service automates account provisioning customization to ensure consistency and implements AWS CodeCommit to help the client avoid spending time integrating Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in its initial setup.
In addition to the Build Cloud Foundations service, the team uses NTT DATA’s Deploy Containers for AWS solution. Deploy Containers for AWS is a ready-to-deploy secure foundation that the team uses to expedite the deployment of the client’s applications. The serverless solution relies on AWS CloudFormation templates to automate deployment and configuration of AWS resources, including Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) on AWS Fargate; Amazon Route 53; AWS Secrets Manager; AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF); Amazon CloudWatch Log Groups and more. Using a 12-factor application containerization approach in conjunction with NTT DATA’s Deploy Containers service, the client’s infrastructure is deployed with a repeatable process and is designed to take advantage of native AWS services.
By leveraging accelerators and jumpstart kits, coupled with deep understanding of financial service application needs, the NTT DATA team delivered the digital transformation this client needed in an accelerated manner. Now the wealth investment firm can offer its customers quality applications in an omnichannel fashion, meeting their needs faster, thereby growing customer loyalty and lifetime value.
Cloud migration benefits
The migration to AWS helped this leading financial services organization accelerate its data center departure and more importantly, it shrank the time to market of newly migrated customer-facing applications. In addition to reducing risk through NTT DATA’s application migration factory, the firm improved its efficiency 19% year over year and has accelerated its ability to bring new capabilities to market in the future, more quickly meeting evolving customer needs.
The company also reduced its data center costs and mainframe MIPS consumption by one-third and achieved new functionality through containerization and automated release management. It now has 70% of its application delivery management pipelines automated and looks forward to reaping additional agility and scalability for continued competitive advantage.