Digital DAIS, through its orchestrated services and solutions capability enables successful execution of key digital initiatives such as Application Modernization, Cloud Migration and Server Consolidation for faster ROI. Our DAIS™ approach simplifies infrastructure transformations, adding benefits that traditional approaches do not account for.
CHALLENGE
A large US-based buy side capital markets firm with a significant global presence and round-the-clock operations had been experiencing challenges in servicing business needs due to continued dependency on dated infrastructure.
The CTO embarked on a major transformation program to create a digital and elastic infrastructure that would modernize existing systems and be flexible enough to scale up on demand when required. It should address ongoing business demands and allow for future growth plans.
APPROACH
DAIS™ Transformation is a value-add approach that takes the industry standards and best practices and ensures that higher degrees of robustness, responsiveness, scalability, and automation are met.
As a primary tech partner, through Digital-DAIS we collaboratively worked with business, technology, applications and operation teams, to develop an exhaustive report and came up with a roadmap and execution plan to achieve infrastructure-transformation objectives.
The report evaluated the current infrastructure based on:
- Mission criticality of applications, databases and platforms
- Compute, Storage, Networks and Security
- Application and Infrastructure Performance against current and projected business growth
- Architecture support for evolving tech and business demands
- Provisioning speed for new applications
- Technology standardization
- Virtualization and Remote Access policies and plans
- Device and Cloud Strategy
- Opportunities and goals for automation, self-service, and secure multi-tenancy
- Risk involvement
- Regulatory compliance
- Cost of operations
- Existing commercial models for business needs
Technology transition was planned and executed on the following three major tracks:
Technology Change: Replace old and obsolete technology with an agile, scalable and secure environment.
- Legacy hardware and hosted environments were replaced with on-demand cloud and virtualized setups.
- Storage: Warm info stored in highly available SSD / Cache storages, while a large chunk of static information was stored on inexpensive cloud buckets.
- Microservices enabled through docker containers.
Process Alignment: Changed processes to align with the new technology stack. Transitioned to Continuous Delivery and Continuous Implementation [CD/CI] pipelines with most recent version controls, multi-device/cloud-based testing and software integration.
Skills Upgrade: Create teams understand the technology and process change:
- We suggested a mixed approach where existing teams were upgraded via skill training, and where there was a need, new talent was brought in.
- Developed integrated skill sets in the areas of Cloud, DevOps and IT Security, ensuring success with the technology changes and project initiatives.
BENEFITS
- Servers Consolidation: From 800+ to 220+. Achieved a reduction in maintenance efforts.
- Culture transition from Traditional to CI/CD. Resulted in continuous and quicker delivery
- OS Migration from a diverse stack to Linux servers. Achieved better capability and sustainability.
Improved network infrastructure:
- Availability, capacity, accessibility, security, performance and monitoring
- Efficiency gains in each of the 23 Data Centres. Achieved frictionless migration.
- Robust Business Continuity Plans [BCP] and Data Recovery Plans [DRP] were put in place
- Process consolidation and maturity benefits
- Upgraded an on-demand available skill set
- Reduced Total Cost of Ownership [TCO] by nearly 40%