Amid intense market shifts, the cosmetics leader embraced agility because their applications showed strain and struggled to meet evolving business requirements. The cloud migration decision marked their transformative journey’s outset, reshaping their tech landscape.
Challenges on the Path to Modernization
Undertaking a journey of this magnitude has its challenges. The cosmetics company faced a series of obstacles:
- Global Disjointed Systems and Interfaces: The customer’s on-premises environment has evolved globally across 30 countries, leading to over 340 applications and interfaces. Aligning these disparate elements while ensuring seamless business continuity presented a formidable challenge.
- Legacy Lock-in: Their monolithic architecture was woven with the threads of legacy .NET and ASP.Net-based applications, interlaced with custom-built applications tied to proprietary licenses. However, this architecture posed the direct challenges of legacy lock-in. Disentangling these silos and ensuring minimal disruption presented an immediate puzzle to be solved.
- Disparate Priorities across the Organization: As the migration and modernization journey progressed, distinct departments revealed varying priorities, requiring precise alignment. Concurrently, transitioning users and stakeholders to the new environment introduced an additional layer of intricacy. Balancing these different priorities while fostering the cultural transition required meticulous planning, transparent communication, and a unified organizational approach.
- Unavailability of Application SMEs and Documentations: The scarcity of application Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) combined with limited application documentation introduced significant knowledge gaps, complicating the modernization project. The absence of comprehensive documentation outlining application architecture and interfaces posed a hurdle in understanding the intricate workings of existing systems, leading to potential roadblocks during the modernization process.
- Data Security and Data Sovereignty Requirements: Safeguarding sensitive data and adhering to stringent data security and data sovereignty requirements were paramount. Balancing accessibility with security presented multifaceted challenges.
- Testing and Quality Assurance: Thorough testing, including functionality, performance, and security testing, is essential to ensure that migrated applications work as expected in the new environment. The lack of a proper test plan and automated testing framework added unplanned delays in post-migration cutover.
Movate’s Application Modernization Framework: A Guiding Hand
Navigating through these challenges, the cosmetic leader found a guiding hand in Movate’s application modernization framework.
- Assessment and Strategy: The modernization journey started by thoroughly assessing the landscape. Movate’s migration specialists collaborated closely with the organization’s stakeholders to devise a strategy that aligned business goals with technical implementation.
- Infrastructure-as-Code First Approach: A key pillar of Movate’s application modernization framework is adopting a Terraform-based infrastructure-as-code first approach. This methodology allowed the organization to codify its infrastructure, enabling automated infra provisioning, configuration, and management, ensuring consistency and scalability.
- Security-First Approach: Movate’s application modernization framework emphasizes a security-as-code and security-first approach, guiding the organization in implementing robust security measures, encryption protocols, and compliance checks.
- Containerization with Docker: Containerization brought portability and consistency to their applications. With Docker at the helm, Movate helped the organization package .NET-based applications and their dependencies, ensuring seamless deployment across various environments.
- Orchestration with Kubernetes: Kubernetes emerged as the orchestrator of choice. Its ability to manage containers at scale and automatic load balancing empowered the cosmetics company to handle traffic spikes effortlessly.
- AI-Driven Integrated Monitoring and Observability: With AI-driven monitoring and observability tools, Movate’s framework enabled the organization to gain real-time insights into their applications’ performance, allowing for proactive issue detection, self-healing, and swift remediation.
Empowering the Journey with AWS’ Game-Changing Accelerators
As the company embarked on its journey towards modernization, AWS’ suite of purpose-built accelerators emerged as pivotal tools, dramatically expediting their journey while addressing distinct challenges:
- AWS Application Discovery Services: This accelerator unveiled the organization’s entire application landscape, identifying the upstream/downstream applications and network port protocol requirements and creating a comprehensive network map. AWS Application Discovery Service bridges the gap between application documentation and application SMEs’ unavailability.
- AWS Migration Hub: As a central command center, the AWS Migration Hub empowered Movate to monitor migration progress. This unified dashboard enabled the tracking of application migrations, dependencies management, and quick resolution of issues arising during the transition.
- AWS Application Migration Service: The initial step in application modernization involved a seamless lift-and-shift of on-premises servers to the AWS Cloud. AWS Application Migration Service handled application discovery, server replication, and automated server launch, simplifying the once-complicated migration process.
- Amazon EKS: Providing a managed Kubernetes platform. Amazon EKS facilitated effortless deployment, scaling, orchestration, and management of Kubernetes Pods.
- AWS Database Migration Service: Finally, the AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) proved invaluable for migrating critical MS SQL Server databases, minimizing downtime, and ensuring data integrity.
The Results: Unleashing Cloud Excellence
As the migration journey reached its destination, the cosmetics leader witnessed the transformational power of their application modernization effort:
- 75-80% Faster Infrastructure Provisioning: Achieved through the infra-as-code first approach, resulting in swift and efficient infrastructure setup for a new product campaign.
- 35-40% Reduction in Security Vulnerabilities: Implemented security-as-code practices that significantly decreased vulnerability exposure.
- 37% Faster Time to Market: Eliminated manual configuration and configuration drifts and adopted a containerization-first approach for expedited product campaign/marketing.
- 27% Decrease in Operational Expenditure (OpEx): Realized by automating infrastructure provisioning and management processes.
Conclusion
The global cosmetics giant’s journey from legacy systems to cloud excellence is a testament to the power of innovation and a well-defined application modernization framework. Through Movate’s guidance and accelerators, the organization modernized its applications and transformed its entire business approach.
In today’s ever-evolving landscape, embracing change is the key to staying ahead. This success story reminds us that organizations can turn challenges into opportunities and lead the way toward a brighter digital future with the right strategy, tools, and partners.
Are you ready to embark on your modernization journey? Let Movate’s framework and accelerators be your compass, guiding you to cloud excellence and technological innovation. The future awaits, and it’s brighter than ever before.
About the Author
Pallab, a Senior Director, and Enterprise Solution Architect, drives cloud initiatives and practices at Movate. With over 16 years of experience spanning diverse domains and global locations, he’s a proficient Multi-Cloud Specialist. Across major cloud Hyperscalers, Pallab excels in orchestrating successful migrations of 25+ workloads. His expertise extends to security, Bigdata, IoT, and Edge Computing. Notably, he’s masterminded over 10 cutting-edge use cases in Data Analytics, AI/ML, IoT, and Edge Computing, solidifying his reputation as a trailblazer in the tech landscape.