by
Narsimha Rao
Executive Vice President, Head - Cloud Infrastructure and Security Solutions and Head - Infosys Validation Solutions

Cloud

The Power of Cloud at the Core

For incumbent organizations, the biggest threat no longer stems from one of their kind, but rather from young and innovative born-digital players. To avoid being disrupted, these enterprises need to match the new competition at every step by finding and harnessing new opportunities, delivering great experiences, bringing cost efficiency to products and services through a variety of channels, and while doing all of this, also reimagine their business using new, digital models.

The problem however, is that the burden of legacy systems at the heart of most traditional enterprises prevents them from doing this with agility and ease. Hence for an organization looking to digitize holistically, the journey of transformation must begin with modernization of its legacy core. The cloud can go a long way in enabling this. Many limitations of the legacy environment, such as their lack of agility and availability, can be overcome by migrating core systems and processes to the cloud. Note however, that this is not simply a matter of lifting and shifting those legacy systems along with their inadequacies to the cloud, but of changing them at the foundation to make them cloud-ready. For that, the enterprise must decide a number of important issues – which cloud (public or private) to use, what assets to divest, what process flows to reengineer and how, etc. As with any major initiative, it is best to proceed with caution, migrating non-core aspects of legacy before core, mission critical elements. Done right, the results can be very impressive. Take the case of an Australian financial services company, whom we helped move to an on-demand business platform on the cloud. The platform, which successfully supports 4 million users, is saving the company so much money that it will likely pay for itself in less than 3 years.

Infosys has helped many of its clients to devise and implement a strategy that not only puts their legacy infrastructure on the cloud but also transforms their business with it. The key elements of this strategy include:

  • Selecting the right private or public cloud to go to
  • Migrating non-core, non-differentiating legacy assets
  • Drawing up a path to modernization
  • Automating cloud migration
  • Reengineering and re-architecting applications and process flows

This strategy has met with significant success. When we replaced the legacy e-commerce solution at a well-known department store group, the new agile platform gave the client better control over the business. To make sure that the platform could support as many as 17,000 shoppers at a time, handle 100,000 product updates daily, while being available for at least 99.99 percent of the time, we had to undertake one of the biggest, most complex Azure e-commerce implementations in the industry. The moment of truth came on Black Friday, when the platform exceeded its business forecast by 20 percent without incident.

Typically, we help clients follow a hybrid approach that is devised after assessing their readiness from a technology, process and people perspective. Here, a unified view of the enterprise cloud ecosystem is invaluable. Hence leveraging the capabilities of the Infosys Enterprise Cloud Ecosystem, we advise clients on how to transform infrastructure, data, and applications for the cloud, following which we jointly evolve their cloud itself. By bringing together all that is required to drive business and IT priorities we make sure that we don’t just stop at delivering managed services, but also help our clients generate new revenue streams. A case in point is the work we did for an airline manufacturer. When the company asked us to help make it easy for their customers to find the right documentation for aircraft maintenance, we delivered a secure public cloud platform for hosting their extensive product manuals, thereby enabling ubiquitous access. The airline manufacturer not only saved more than a million dollars in customer servicing cost, but also monetized this facility by allowing other aircraft companies to put up their own documentation for a subscription fee. Our client earned substantially in new revenues in the first year itself.

We believe that our vast experience in application development and maintenance in different areas and deep understanding of technology and its performance in different contexts is the key to our success. Infosys has a suite of vertical-specific reference architectures and accelerators to codify and automate workload migration, and thereby earn huge savings for clients. To that we add AI-led insights for further benefits. We enjoy the support of cloud service provider partners, including AWS, Azure, Oracle and Google, who bring their considerable strengths to any implementation. Last but not least, we bring a set of people committed to delivering unprecedented value to clients in their pursuit of digital transformation.