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Case study

The challenge

Running applications in a traditional data center might not be the best way to save money nowadays. Our client, a supplier of healthcare products, technologies and therapies across more than 100 countries, was not able to scale its applications. In spite of using virtual machines in its data centers, the company had availability issues, along with high infrastructure and license costs. Scalability issues affected the company’s capability to respond to customer transactions during peak hours. Network and data center shortcomings restricted application availability. In 2018, the company’s data center provider announced the closure of managed facilities in Europe. Consequently, it had only six months to look for an alternative, and migrating to the cloud was the best option. Being a trusted partner since 2012, the client turned to Cognizant to help with the migration and cloud enablement.

Our approach

As part of the migration, Cognizant moved 125 applications from the company’s existing IBM data center environment to the AWS Cloud, to run on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. We also built a fully automated deployment platform that enables developers to move applications easily to an Amazon Elastic Container Service. The highly scalable and fast container management service makes it simple to run, stop and manage Open Liberty containers on a cluster. Open Liberty is an open-source version of IBM WebSphere, which the company used previously for hosting applications. Using this AWS platform helped the company slash infrastructure costs by 62%. We also created the container deployment platform to automate updates relating to new project releases or changes in the Amazon Machine Images used in AWS. This allowed the company to forego a dedicated software team and reduce operational costs by 50%.

Shift to AWS Cloud generates striking results

Cognizant completed the client’s migration to AWS Cloud within six months, saving $220,000 a year on IBM WebSphere Application Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system licenses. The results were so striking that the company chose us to migrate more than 100 U.S. workloads to the AWS Cloud. Previously, it took at least three weeks to migrate an application. The cloud migration rate, however, stepped that up to three applications per week. The company now enjoys fully automated deployment operations without any operational burden. 

76%

overall savings

50%

reduction in operational costs

62%

reduction in infrastructure costs