Application development drives modernization on AWS cloud

Challenge

A large federal insurance program needed to migrate its applications to the AWS cloud. The agency uses over 80 applications of various ages and stages, some built over 30 years ago. Applications that were not cloud-ready required significant refactoring prior to migration. Monolithic databases added complexity because some applications accessing the database were not cloud-ready.

The goals for this cloud migration project were to sustain and modernize current applications and tools in production, continue to innovate, design, deploy, develop, and maintain new IT systems, and—ultimately—efficiently develop and deliver new financial products.

 

Approach

The Guidehouse team’s unique expertise as a leading cloud migration and IT transformation provider has become essential to the agency through its successful and ongoing transformation and AWS cloud adoption. Guidehouse deployed strategic and technical experts to facilitate the evaluation and implementation of the modernization project as follows:

• Evaluated applications for cloud-readiness
• Our AWS certified solution architect developed a roadmap for the migration process and built a migration team
• Conducted detailed requirements, gathered estimates, and deconstructed requirements into manageable tasks
• Created sprint reporting and metric dashboards to promote velocity and capacity transparency
• Established a schedule and processes to enable surge team members to support operations and maintenance efforts during migration
• Developed a new application using AWS native services and AWS Lambda that processes billions of transactions per year

Guidehouse expertise continues to guide the migration of 80 applications from the on-prem environment to cloud, including 70 to AWS. The cloud migration process will continue to take place over a two-year timeframe and includes adopting DevSecOps.

 

Impact

Guidehouse collaborates with the agency on an ongoing basis to help them achieve their goals and solve complex problems migrating applications of various ages and stages to the cloud. The agency is now able to consistently implement technological changes to improve processing time, eliminate travel, and reduce manual work. The public user experience has also improved with faster website load times and transaction processing times. For example, website features that used to take 20 seconds to load now take only a couple of seconds, and transactions that used to take hours to process now take seconds.