Migrating a Critical Windows Application to AWS
Customer profile
Location: Dallas, TX
Industry: Telecommunications
Project Duration: 12 weeks
The Challenge – Migrating a Critical Windows Application to AWS
One of the largest telecommunications providers in the United States, renowned for its comprehensive communications and technology solutions, needed help. It wanted to move a critical application to the cloud, and to do it right—without major hassles—so that migration would need an expert hand. This on-premise application, responsible for transactional analysis, was primarily Windows-based. Since it was at the end of its service life (EOSL), the migration required a full stack upgrade, and a detailed evaluation of the current application environment was needed to design a suitable target system.
The critical transaction application required certain scaling and failover requirements, but the legacy application lacked a suitable CI/CD standard to meet the 90-day rehydration policy for cloud resources. It had a Windows-based, three-tier architecture with external vendor integrations, and all application requests needed to go through a firewall to meet current security requirements. Migrating this application to the cloud and meeting the latest enterprise-level security guidelines would require complete application modernization. The telecom provider needed end-to-end automated deployment and a dynamic workflow
as part of the upcoming migration.
The company took advantage of the automated cloud migration and automated application modernization capabilities with container support and lifecycle management of Matilda Migrate.
The Solution – Automated Cloud Migration and Application Modernization
First, the telecom company used Matilda Discover to run a preliminary assessment of the application infrastructure and services needed to design the environment needed upon migration. This automated application discovery provided detailed application analysis, highlighting dependencies, resource usage, and end-of-life statuses.
With Matilda Migrate, the company took advantage of automated cloud migration and automated application modernization capabilities with container support and lifecycle management. The output from the Discover tool was analyzed by Matilda Migrate, which then was used to generate Terraform infrastructure-as-code for the target system. Thanks to templates within Matilda Migrate that can integrate with the security tools of enterprise systems, the migration process ensured that the deployments met both security and governance guidelines of the company, as well as their scalability and performance requirements.
Results:
Matilda successfully migrated the application to the cloud and modernized all necessary applications without any significant issues. The deployment was carried out within the scheduled timeline; Matilda Cloud reduced the total time taken to deploy the application from weeks to a matter of hours. Matilda
ensured all foundation blocks were available and adhered to the security standards of AWS and the telecom company in order for a seamless migration.
The company also experienced the following benefits thanks to Matilda:
- All CI/CD deployment steps were automated, resulting in a zero-click rehydration process
- AWS services were properly designed and utilized to meet application performance requirements
- The manual effort for the migration needed was dramatically reduced—by more than 80%—through automation features
- The transaction application’s performance on the cloud is enhanced compared to its previous on-premise iteration
- The seamless security process integration during migration was aided by automated Terraform infrastructure-as-code
Learn more about Matilda Discover, and Matilda Migrate.