“The team members at Altair were highly skilled and extremely efficient with our migration to the cloud. They spent time understanding our many issues, integrating well with our internal folks, and in turn, found the avenues for the most optimal cloud solutions specific to our needs.” IT Executive at said organization.”
problem
A leading worldwide organization in the insurance industry has been unable to access data efficiently for critical decisions, decreasing their ability to respond to changing market dynamics. The company has experienced multiple data breaches which has impacted the company’s reputation. Operational inefficiencies have been increasing due to multiple business acquisitions, technology silos, and increasing customer demands. The IT organization is currently incapable of properly addressing these issues with proper security and compliance.
goal
The goal of the company was to be a cloud first, security first – digital organization that can quickly adjust to the ever-changing demands of the customer and the business. In order to do this the company needed to adjust their IT capabilities to keep up with the ever-changing demands of the insurance business. The approach taken allows for the environments to be automated with enterprise security built in, while enabling the ability to access data quicker and more efficiently, decrease costs and increase ROI. The team worked to understand the current environmental design, pain points and security risks. The subject matter experts of the existing designs were brought to the table to make sure the new design was not done in a silo and included as part of the next generation design. together and The cloud allows by eliminating the management of multiple operating systems, and ultimately enhancing the customer experience. They were looking for an enterprise class security and compliance environment to ensure all customers’ data was trusted, safe and secure in their hands, and they wanted to analyze their data faster and better than before. Altair did this by taking the company into a server-less environment.
assessment & discovery phase
Altair consultants integrated with the internal team members and understood from all levels of the organization what the pain points were. They discovered that there was mixture of multiple technology platforms such as Windows 2003-2016, RedHat Linux 5.x-7.x, Oracle Exadata, SAP Hana, Horton Works, RedHat OpenShift, Kubernetes and others. Understanding their integration points and the organizations future state road maps.
These systems were hosted on premise, in a cloud based data center extension and in cloud solutions that were not connected to the on premise systems.
These systems were hosted on premise, in a cloud based data center extension and in cloud solutions that were not connected to the on premise systems.
architect phase
This technology disparity required a new architecture to be designed to help implement a solution that allowed for migrations of old technologies, implementation of new technologies, while securing the environment for the highest level of security required for company and customer data. The final approach was to be cloud first with the elimination of on premise data center the end goal.
migration phase
The migration phase started with a “proof of value” that implement the core design of the new solution as automated secure scripting managed in a DevSecOps methodology. The automation of the environment and the cloud first approach allowed for the team to implement a rapid design and revision process through CI/CD* (Continuous Integration and Deployment). The migration of applications into the environment became code that was repeatable and reusable. This included legacy applications as well as green field applications to land in the new cloud environment.
operationalize
The operations teams are part of the assessment, architecture and migration phases. They helped create the scripting and monitoring needed to reduce hands on interaction of the environment when there were problems. They helped script the automated responses to events and ticketing needed if they were not able to automate a solution. The technology shift to cloud and use of automation moved the model from capital expenditure to operational expenditure. Operation expenses are reduced because of the shift to automation and the cloud.
train
Communication: Starting early in the process, communication is key for buy-in from employees at all levels of the organization. An internal marketing campaign was created to communicate the goals of the new systems, what problems would be solved from migrating to the cloud and what the benefits were to cloud migration. There was an emphasis on transforming the old school way of thinking and creating a culture of innovation and forward thinking. The campaign was communicated using a combination of channels including emails, meetings, bulletin postings and social media posts.
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