Executive Summary
vNEXT collaboratively and iteratively delivered an outstanding application modernisation project to one of Australia’s most well known brands in Finance. The results included a cost saving of half a million dollar per year, considerable sercurity risk downgrade (from High to Medium level), slashing of downtime, and a very welcome boost to productivity, all this within weeks.
| Industry | Finance |
| Expertise | Application Modernisation, Migration, Development |
| Technologies | Azure App Service, Azure SQL Database, Docker Containers, Azure Key Vault, and Azure DevOps |
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The existing application is hard to update and patch, leading to an increased risk and compromised security posture.
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Updating the application, fixing defects or implementing new features takes a long time to implement leading to increased costs, higher friction, and frustrated development and support teams.
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The existing application is running on a major cloud provider (not on Microsoft Azure), but it was migrated using lift-and-shift approach. Therefore, the cost of hosting and maintaining the application was too high.
Solution
vNEXT engaged key stakeholders to assess and document key aspects of the existing application such as connectivity, databases, infrastructure, and dependencies. Key activities included:
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vNEXT led workshops with key stakeholders to assess, plan, and document the existing application along with its databases, infrastructure, and any other dependencies.
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Based on the customer's scenario, vNEXT designed and proposed an application modernisation roadmap based on vNEXT's Apps Modernisation Plan.
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In less than 2 weeks, vNEXT delivered an initital Proof-of-Concept and a Proof-of-Value, serving a critical role in shaping a common understanding of the proposed architecture and its potential benefits. This also helped in mitigating risks as early as possible.
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vNEXT collaborated with the customer team to gather feedback and iteratively improve and productionise the applicaiton and its infrastructure.
Outcome
vNEXT strong cloud-native experience and its collaborative approach were demonstrated in delivering great results within weeks. The team was able to take the customer on a journey, helping them imagine the possibilities with the aid of a Proof-of-Concept at the start of the engagement. Key deliverables included:
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A modernised application that is live and production ready on Microsoft Azure, taking advantage of Azure App Service, and other Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) services.
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The new version of the application was dynamically and automatically scalable meaning that our customer only pay for what they used. This resulted in significant cost savings (approx. $500k / year).
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A fully-automated, repeatable, and reproducible deployment pipelines that helps the customer push changes faster with confidence. The customer can now promote changes from Development, to Testing, to Production with automated verification as well as controlled approval gates. This resulted in reduced human error, improved reliability, and a significant boot to Developer Productivity.
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Our work not only made it easier to update and secure the application but also made it easy to update and test locally. Developers were finding it difficult to reproduce certain defect as it was not easy to run the application locally or onboard new team members to the DEV team. This was all resolved with the modernised version of the app.
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The improvements we made to secure the app helped our customer to reduce their Risk Level from High to Medium.
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We helped our customer reduce downtime from hours or days to under 20 min.