Overview
Across all industries, organizations notice a push for cloud migration to transform into a more agile, innovative and effective team. While the benefits of cloud are ubiquitous, an organization’s journey to the cloud is unique to each of their goals and needs, which is especially true for a $900-billion U.S. investment firm that was looking to GFT to manage their transition to the cloud.
With a shortened timeline and ambitious objective to transition from an on-premises accounting system to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, GFT deployed a Right Shore team to unleash the advantages of cloud platforms to replace the investment firm’s unsustainable infrastructure.
Objective
A large U.S. investment firm was struggling with the significant processing demands of producing quarterly reports for investors. Its on-premises system required both accounting and reporting tools to track its investment positions and data. Before GFT came to help, the firm managed its own IT systems, which were costly to maintain and expensive to upgrade. Its legacy technology lacked the processing capacity that the firm needed every quarter, which was not sustainable.
With GFT’s guidance, the firm decided to upgrade from its on-premises systems to the AWS cloud platform. This complete migration would provide instant access to the unlimited computing and storage of the cloud and allow the firm to adopt agile methods, improve applications development and provide continuous delivery. A migration this size is a massive undertaking and GFT needed to finish it quickly to comply with the firm’s end-of-quarter reporting regulations.
To achieve the goal of this system transformation, GFT knew staffing the perfect team was paramount. This group of professionals would need to work closely to seamlessly transition between each project phase. The team needed expertise and understanding of the on-premises system and AWS cloud. Mixing experts with varying levels of experience was key in this case. As team members were replete with several years of experience with the client, new joiners and expertise in cloud migration, engineering, DevOps and quality assurance, GFT trusted this Right Shore team to lead one of the firm’s most crucial initiatives: their journey to the cloud.
Process
The firm trusted GFT’s record of delivering quality and efficiency and wanted a staffing strategy that recruited professionals within the same time zone. To meet their desire to cut costs and complete the project quickly, they chose to capitalize on our nearshore-based teams as a viable solution to complement their existing technical development capabilities in India, China and other Asian regions. The firm had multiple teams and the migration strategy varied among them. The GFT Migration Factory identified each team’s objectives and developed a strategy based on four key steps:
- Determining how to migrate each application and quantify the benefits
- Planning the migration sequence and system of governance
- Designing a bespoke “factory” to integrate the resources of GFT, the firm and AWS
- Transferring knowledge to client teams to ensure self-sufficiency on the new tech stack
The nearshore team that was involved played a pivotal role in collaborating in the design and execution of a comprehensive migration plan, leveraging their domain knowledge and cost optimization strategies to achieve the critical organizational goal of transitioning entirely to the cloud. This milestone empowered the firm to maximize cloud scalability, agility and cost efficiency while driving innovation and growth, made possible through the close collaboration of GFT’s skilled consultants and cost-effective solutions.
Results
Now, the firm’s critical and peripheral systems are running on the cloud. Despite the tight schedule, the team completed their first delivery within six weeks. As a result, the firm achieved over 45% cost reduction compared to hiring local resources in New York.
The GFT team were able to meet the tight delivery deadline in part due to the team’s dedication and hard work within the same time zone as the client’s stakeholders. Interacting with client decision-makers and leveraging our experience with the company within shared business hours allowed for better communication and productivity. This connection with the company’s stakeholders empowered GFT’s team to work confidently across different time zones as well, which meant that the project’s progress didn’t stop when the typical workday in the clients’ time zone ended. With a nearshore team of experts sitting in multiple regions, including Costa Rica, Brazil and Poland, the project truly had round-the-clock care.
With the move, GFT helped align the firm’s technology and business strategies. With unlimited server resources, it can seize business opportunities quickly and cost-effectively. Migrating to AWS cloud enables more agile business practices and more secure data management. The firm can adjust processing speed, memory and drive space easily and as needed, especially when processing demands surge.
Implications
With strong cloud provider partnerships and teams across the globe, GFT is well-positioned to guide organizations through their journey to the cloud. This migration offers the opportunity for new levels of innovation, data management and security. Explore GFT’s many success stories enabled by cloud technology to understand the scope of our experience.
Our Right Shore teams are skilled in implementing these migrations and providing a cost-effective option for organizations looking to make the transition to cloud. With time-zone overlap and cultural alignment, using a Right Shore team can ensure companies achieve their objectives without making sacrifices with respect to their budgets or schedules.