On our recent webinar, Lessons from a Financial Institution Migration Project, one member of the audience asked how our software and our methodology speed up migrations. Agility and speed are the new business currencies, especially in the banking world. But agility and speed can’t come at the risk of breaking stringent control standards or compliance with regulations.

Of course many companies operate in an industry where highly confidential data is used and compliance is mandatory, requiring that they manage regulatory changes and establish internal controls. But no industry feels the weight of security concerns more than financial services — as they face both global privacy regulations like GDPR, and industry-specific regulations like GLBA and FFIEC.

IT agility requires insight and a deep understanding of your environment. By understanding how applications work, teams can confidently make decisions about migrating apps while eliminating risk. And to accelerate the process, teams should leverage an orchestration platform that configures and invokes transport tools in order to migrate at scale.

The demand for digital transformation and application mobility is coming fast and furious. The vast array of technology choices combined with a multitude of applications and their dependencies that are often distributed across different hosting sites create a complex IT environment – and that complexity stops decision-makers in their tracks. Which means that the goal of agility is lost in IT paralysis out of “not wanting to make a bad decision.”

In our webinar, we demonstrated how a global banking institution made the strategic decision to move forward with a complex hybrid cloud and data center migration, a critical step toward digital transformation. Initially, this IT team had relied on their auto-discovery tools to capture, assess and map their current data. But the data generated was out of date, inaccurate, or didn’t offer enough information to make decisions.

The team was stuck. Infrastructure was spread across a disparate environment, making it difficult for the team to uncover dependencies, identify critical apps and their compliance or security requirements, document findings and turn them into actionable insights.

To get unstuck and back on track, the team imported data from all their systems using our TransitionManager platform. They were able to rapidly aggregate, normalize, and consolidate the data for every asset across IT. Once in the internal repository, the team could visualize interrelationships across assets, easily tracking how they worked across hosting sites.

When the team could review their environment through a wider, deeper lens, both subject matter experts and business owners could validate the accuracy of data and incorporate business constraints and requirements that must be considered during the planning and execution of the migration. Project teams could then better map out how many move events will occur, and define groups of assets to move together, making sure to package all asset dependencies together.

The team was able to ensure that the groups of assets to move are manageable by the available resources, and that move dates aligned with business constraints and requirements. The results were impressive, with 1,000 workloads moved in a week, without unexpected outages.

Key Accelerators for IT leaders tackling a migration (in any industry):

1. Establish a roadmap and migration plan

Before beginning the transformation journey, the firm should develop a roadmap and migration plan that establishes priorities and the steps needed to accomplish them in sequence. The cloud architecture should incorporate backup and redundancy features while addressing regulatory, security and performance requirements.

2. Rethink your methodology

A holistic cloud implementation should result in a centralized, fact-based migration plan that incorporates business facts and leverages automation to be sure the facts associated with each application are carried forward for changes you may make in the future. Through a robust, tightly controlled approach to governance, companies are positioned to conduct business as usual in parallel with cloud migration initiatives without worry of a breakdown.

3. Gain control of your ecosystem

Be sure you have a holistic view of your environment so you can see all of your applications and infrastructure and all of their interdependencies. Cloud migration decisions should be based on business facts and requirements but your process should also be highly scalable and enable portability.

4. Build automated runbooks for faster execution

By  fully automating virtual migration projects, you’ll eliminate huge bottlenecks and maximize the use of migration tools like HCX. By fully automating executions, you can generate a 10-fold improvement in speed  and a matching reduction in migration engineering time.

To see how a large, multi-national financial services company was able to successfully migrate multiple, complex workloads to the cloud on time while adhering to strict move event schedules and staying in compliance, watch the webinar replay:

Register to View the Webinar Replay:

How a global financial services firm completed a complex migration with efficiency and control