Application & Datacenter Modernization

Application and Datacenter Modernization is the rethinking of everything I.T. related that helps organizations leapfrog into leveraging newer and better ways of handling security, cloud, mobile, and collaborative communications .

The end goal is to help organizations transition to a more agile, secure, and simplified model that is not only easier to support and manage, but also more cost-efficient to maintain and administer.

To better understand what this really means for organizations, here’s an example of an engagement CCO did for one of its customers over the past 18-months.

“Financial Services Organization Decreases I.T. Spend from $15mil/year to $4.5mil/year”

Company Background: a mid-size financial services organization with employees, offices, and datacenters on 4 continents, running the latest on-premise technologies meshed across 7 datacenters in a high availability, highly redundant enterprise architecture. The organization started its journey to the cloud by migrating emails and files to a cloud-based platform; however 2-years into it, the organization was now spending 30% more on I.T. than when it was solely on-prem. The problem was that while they eliminated many servers and systems by going SaaS for email and files, they still had 100% of the same I.T. footprint and infrastructure as they had prior to their migration of workloads to the cloud.

CCO’s Involvement: CCO shared with the CFO and CIO of the organization that cloud does decrease I.T. costs; however, to achieve cost savings, the organization needs to consolidate and eliminate their on-premise footprint as quickly as it shifts resources to the cloud. The faster they can migrate, the sooner they can reap the cost and operational efficiencies.

CCO’s Solution: CCO embarked on a 13-month process to accelerate the migration of over 1,000 applications and systems to an efficient cloud and hybrid on-prem datacenter model, re-hosting some applications, re-platforming others, and re-factoring and envisioning entirely new and better application fulfillment methods with the rest. CCO leveraged scripted processes and automation tools it developed in engagements with other customers to transition 20-30 systems a day during peak times.

The End Result: Start to finish, CCO helped this organization go from a $15-million a year spend in I.T. running 7 datacenters around the world, to 1 datacenter and $3.5-million a year in cloud spend, bringing total I.T. spend down to $4.5-million a year.

The organization saved over $10-million a year within 18-months, with most applications in a more nimble cloud-based model, however with several line of business applications that were not cloud-ready still running in a hybrid model.

CCO has repeated this model for organizations of varying sizes, with some organizations' transformation taking less than 6-months instead of initial projections of internal I.T. believing the transition process would take 3-5 years. CCO has helped dozens of organizations of varying size, industry, and scope leverage the knowledge, best practices, and technical abilities to modernize their I.T. environments with less impact to users, greater financial savings, in a shorter amount of time than initially believed possible.