Migration cuts cost by 35%. Frees time for innovation

Modernizing to serve a large, complex market

The nonprofit cooperative faced a growing demand for financial services in Brazil’s large, complex and fragmented healthcare system. It wanted to improve its ability to serve members quickly and easily, wherever they were located. This was a particular challenge in hard-to-reach, rural areas. Healthcare organizations and professionals must be able to process payments, buy essential supplies, pay staff salaries and access credit to serve patients effectively.

With its aging on-premises infrastructure, the cooperative found it difficult to deploy new applications such as digital payments and its own online credit card – services that can help it compete with large banks and other financial institutions. Delays, disruptions and outages were hurting member satisfaction. Frequent downtime was also reducing workplace productivity and employee morale. In addition, maintaining legacy systems was costly, and those expenses kept rising.

The cooperative was already using some AWS services and recognized that it could innovate faster, become more efficient and speed up the delivery of new offerings to members by migrating its on-premises systems to the AWS Cloud. Modernizing its IT would also make it easier to-comply with strict security standards like the PCI standard for online payments and account data, privacy laws and other regulatory requirements.

With these goals in mind, the cooperative turned to SoftwareOne for advice on how to migrate from its on-premises data center into the cloud. It also wanted administrative and operational support for migration planning and execution.

Transforming in 2 stages over 3 years

Building on its extensive experience with cloud migration and working with many nonprofits, SoftwareOne analyzed the cooperative’s IT environment and costs, assessed its migration readiness and collaborated to build a case for modernization. After developing a detailed migration strategy, SoftwareOne rolled out changes incrementally, testing performance and results at every stage.

Based on the cooperative’s needs, SoftwareOne deployed its Simple for AWS service, carrying out several projects to understand the IT environment and optimize it using AWS:

• Cloud assessment – This analyzed the cooperative’s total cost of ownership, assessed its readiness to move to the cloud and defined a migration strategy. The assessment recommended a complete lift-and-shift migration from the cooperative’s on-premises data center to AWS.
• Cloud foundation – Working closely with AWS Professional Services, SoftwareOne developed a migration strategy for the cooperative. This established the foundation for the AWS landing zone architecture, AWS accounts, governance strategy, security, compliance and training.
• Workload migrations – SoftwareOne and AWS Professional Services began migration while minimizing downtime by using a variety of AWS services. The cooperative’s development and test environments were migrated first, enabling the organization to increase application resiliency, agility and flexibility of those environments using automation and other AWS services.
• Additional services – Providing an end-to-end managed cloud service including a 24x7 Support Center for AWS Support, SoftwareOne helps the organization with continuous cost optimization and governance. The cooperative gains ongoing control and visibility of AWS Cloud spending, based on SoftwareOne’s PyraCloud platform, ensuring use of the right management tools from the beginning.

The first part of the cooperative’s migration to AWS is now complete. The second phase – migrating the production environment to the cloud – is still underway. This phase also includes replatforming or refactoring applications from the development environment that couldn’t simply be lifted and shifted to AWS.

More efficient IT paves way for innovation

Using SoftwareOne’s cloud assessment, the cooperative has been able to cut costs by 35% through a lift-and-shift migration from its on-premises data center to AWS. With the saved money, the organization can invest more in innovation that directly benefits its members. For example, new digital financial services can make it easier for healthcare professionals to launch clinical studies, research projects and other programs that improve their patients’ health. In turn, this improves the customer experience and builds loyalty in the cooperative’s members.

SoftwareOne’s roadmap for the cooperative outlines a three-year cloud modernization program covering more than 600 servers, 100 platforms, 30 database servers and 200+ microservices. By migrating applications and related workloads first, SoftwareOne and the cooperative effectively tackled one of the nonprofit’s biggest challenges at the start of the process, improving customer service and team morale. Having moved to the AWS cloud, the cooperative can now more easily comply with the enhanced security and data protection standards of the medical field.