The Challenge

Yesterday’s structure for tomorrow’s objective.

The financial services firm faced a rapidly approaching deadline to exit on-premises data centers and migrate its portfolio to the cloud, and teams were not ready for the effort ahead. After deciding against a datacenter lease renewal, the firm set a goal to migrate over 500 applications from on-premises facilities to AWS in 24 months. Many applications used legacy patterns and technology and required significant modernization. Initial progress was hindered because skills were siloed, and teams were unaccustomed to collaborative DevOps methods. The organization favored specialized teams and cross-team accountability over multi-disciplinary teams with full stack accountability. To speed progress and improve delivery quality, the firm sought Credera’s help to coach teams and accelerate their cloud application delivery process.

The Solution

Advising teams to accelerate cloud adoption.

The client engaged Credera to provide architectural guidance, migration planning, cloud skills assessments, and process recommendations. Credera began by meeting with individual application teams and offering guidance on their migration roadmap. Credera also created and distributed a survey to over 1,100 members of the technology organization to assess AWS skills proficiency. By pairing interviews with data-driven survey results, Credera was able to better understand pain points and roadblocks and mobilize resources to accelerate progress. Next, Credera leveraged the AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART) and Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) to align teams on migration needs and priorities. Credera encouraged teams to increase the frequency and structure of cross-team collaboration to align team members around measurable goals and identify barriers early in the process. Credera also educated teams on cloud adoption best practices. Cloud advisory recommendations included comprehensive team and process improvements, AWS architecture blueprints and enhancements, and cloud training plans. Credera reinforced that teams should have faith but confront reality when setting team goals.

The Results

Client-driven migration acceleration.

As a result of its partnership with Credera, teams embraced the challenge, set clear goals and priorities, and began driving adoption results independently.

• Application teams developed a clear understanding of cloud benefits, available cloud tools/services, and how to onboard portfolios of applications to AWS.

• Cloud engineering teams embraced a product-centric mindset, prioritizing needs based on feature requests from application teams rather than their own perceived priorities.

• Executives gained clarity on the state of their cloud adoption plan and where to focus time and resources to complete the cloud migration in the desired timeframe.