Talent Solutions to Support Cloud Migration Initiative for a Financial Services Company

The Challenge:

This client, one of the largest national mutual fund companies, had an extensive number of applications maintained by different development teams across the organization. Inefficiencies were prolific as there was no standardization, little reusable code or common framework across applications, and redevelopment efforts were largely done in isolation. Lack of communication between the different groups disallowed them the ability to leverage work that had already been done by other teams. They were engaging AWS at a high level, but the code was a patchwork quilt representing many years of customization and diverse coding standards. Many of these applications were live transactional instruments, managing millions of dollars with split second response times. There was ultimately a total of 820 applications that needed to be migrated in a three-year period.

The Solution:

Eliassen Group was entrusted with an advisory leadership role, overseeing the project management responsibilities of the cloud migration initiative and providing direct assistance for the key stakeholders. The development teams across the organization were able to benefit from Eliassen Group’s architect level developers, who were able to teach them to do the work independently and thereby improve the projected timeline. The developers were also focused on seeding the migration effort application-by-application. Analysts with specific AWS cloud migration experience were positioned to coordinate between the teams, and a process coordinator steered traffic and established priorities across workstreams. The Eliassen Group project management initiative was put in place to accelerate delivery and achieve economy of scale across parallel initiatives.

The Result:

The group tasked with migrating applications to the cloud was able to improve turnaround time from 12 weeks to 4, under the guidance of Eliassen Group. This efficiency allowed them to dramatically shorten their timeline by over a year, resulting in a projected cost savings of approximately $7M.