Category: Modernizations

Cloud Computing / Modernizations / Strategy

A 10-step guide to a reliable, repeatable & risk-optimized approach to cloud migration

A 10-step guide to a reliable, repeatable & risk-optimized approach to cloud migration. 1. Define business goals & KPIs to layout a clear definition of success. 2. Identify current-state roadblocks to the above goals. 3. Consider technology as table stake. Focus on people, processes, culture, and value of the existing IT landscape. 4. Set up a COE made up of reps from business, leadership, technology, cross-functional teams, to play the change agent within the organization. 5. Establish inventory of existing applications. Leverage 6R framework (Retain, Retire, Re-host, Re-architect, Re-platform, Rewrite) to identify what can stay on, what needs to change...

Cloud Computing / Data Strategy / Digital Transformation / Modernizations / Strategy

What is the future of RDBMS?

Serverless philosophy came a long way & likely to be the default architecture paradigm of the future. Currently, there are heavy uses of “serverless” for websites, applications, APIs, workflows & CDNs. In contrast, serverless RDBMSs are still not so widely used. While there are offerings like AWS Aurora (for MySQL), there are concerns in terms of security, access control, transaction mgmt, etc. As a result, RDBMSs still mostly get deployed either as on-prem or in VPC private subnets. But such deployments fail to align well with serverless apps & front-ends? Should then lambda functions with infinite scalability be allowed to...

Artificial Intelligence / Big Data / Cloud Computing / Data Strategy / Digital Transformation / Insurance / Integrations / Leadership / Machine Learning / Modernizations / NOSQL / Strategy

A “member enrollment” challenge in group employee benefits that is far deep-rooted than was thought to be, and how a “next-gen” solution can fix it.

Why member enrollment is an area of concern! Member enrollment is a crucial business function in healthcare and insurance group benefits and is directly associated with customer experience. It influences the experiences of all major external personas in the following way: Eligible employees start receiving coverage protection only when successfully enrolled in the carrier’s system Employers depend on the successful completion of the enrollment process for determining premium installments and accounting Plan administrators get paid only when the enrollment process is complete Brokers receive commission only on successful completion of the enrollment process as the way to determine employee participation...

Big Data / Modernizations

Should we convert an existing Data Warehouse to Data Lake?

Should we convert an existing Data Warehouse to Data Lake? Often I get this question. I think this decision should be driven by rational evaluation of business needs & not because “all cool dudes are doing it”. DW has been around for a couple of decades. Historically, it’s been a gold-copy of operational data in structured format & the main BI enabler. Many of these DWs are built on legacy platforms on-premise with layers of interconnected data-marts evolving over years into complex “bus” constructs. Also, the business that used a DW for decades understands its data very well for analytic...

Cloud Computing / Legacy / Migrations / Modernizations / Strategy

What workloads you must move to the Cloud – Part 3 (for Batch workloads)

Batch workloads date back to the early days of computation when mainframes dominated the computing world.  They still play a significant role in different disciplines including business, engineering, medical, healthcare, and other areas. Batch workloads are normally designed to run in the background and are meant to process huge amounts of data. What are the challenges of running batch workloads on-premise? 1. Poor customer experience Less availability of business functionality On-premise IT ecosystems typically have batch workloads that need an extensive amount of computing and storage provisioning. This is why real-time workloads cannot share environments with batch workloads due to...

Cloud Computing / Migrations / Modernizations / Strategy

What workloads you must move to the Cloud – Part 2 (for application resilience)

What is application resilience? How do we define application resilience! Application resilience is the ability of the application to tackle problems in one or more of its components without any degradation in its quality of service. A resilient application should be able to elastically handle failures and recover to its original state in a minimum time period. Resilience ensures that an application runs perfectly all the time, in other words, it makes the application reliable. Thus, reliability is the outcome, while resilience is the way to that outcome. What are the fundamental elements that build up application resilience? The key...

Scaling

Cloud Computing / Migrations / Modernizations / Strategy

What workloads you must move to the Cloud – Part 1 (for application scalability)

Many organizations, including a lot of those in Fortune 500, are running all or most of their business applications on-premise. These organizations have not considered moving their applications to the public cloud yet as a result of which they are unable to take advantage of the strategic advantages that public cloud offers in terms of performance & application scalability, reliability, cost-benefit, innovations, and operational excellence. What that leads to is that these organizations still grapple with issues that concern with application scalability, availability, high infrastructure costs, and limitations in business capabilities. Thus, if you are in charge of managing and...

Integrations / Migrations / Modernizations

Six things insurers must get right for platform modernization strategy

If you are responsible for platform modernization strategy for an organization that has been grappling with age-old legacy platforms, then this article is for you. Why platform modernization strategy is important? Platform modernization strategy for legacy applications is among the top priorities for insurance carriers. Insurance IT applications are traditionally run on old legacy platforms which is operationally painful in several ways in the context of a modern competitive market. Legacy platforms lead to low flexibility and poor agility that impact customer experience. The rigidity in these platforms results in high IT change management that substantially increases the operational latency...

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Legacy / Migrations / Modernizations

How lack of pre-analysis doubles or triples the costs for business rule extraction from legacy systems

Legacy platform modernization is one of the top IT priorities for most business organizations. It is a key strategy for organizations to stay relevant in the modern market. However, legacy modernization is typically a large and complex initiative. One of the reasons why legacy modernization is complex is because it typically involves business rule extraction from legacy systems. Business rule extraction from legacy mainframe systems has always been a complex task, involves a lot of unknowns, and the degree of accuracy is traditionally low. This makes it difficult to estimate what it takes to perform business rule extraction with reasonable...