Amdocs orchestrates AWS cloud migration for a leading UK FSI
Through a large-scale cloud migration to AWS, the Global Digital Remittance Service Provider improved resilience, security, and agility—delivering $1M in savings while laying the foundation for future innovation.
To maintain its high growth trajectory, the Cross-Border Payments Leader needed to enhance system stability while continuing to innovate at pace. This prompted a large-scale cloud-to-cloud migration to AWS. Amdocs executed the migration, hitting all targets, saving money and priming the IT infrastructure for ongoing modernization. The upshot is advanced customer-centricity and best-of-breed security standards.
About the Customer: UK-based FSI is a cloud-native international remittance service provider with a heavy focus on mobile-to-mobile transfers. Its primary audience is expats and migrant workers, who can send money home via an app. While the sending side is cashless, recipients have a wide range of options including bank deposit, cash collection, mobile airtime top-up and mobile money.
It operates in 50 ‘send’ countries and 150 ‘receive’ countries, with 4 million users worldwide. The US, where it has a license to operate in all states, is currently the biggest send market.
Scaling demands rigour as well as vigour
As the business scales, it needs to ensure underlying systems meet the highest standards of stability and resilience, while continuing to differentiate on speed, service, security and value.
Rapid growth inevitably brings challenges, and high levels of demand were putting pressure on the FSI’s legacy cloud platform. There was an increased risk of system outages which could hinder user access to services, impacting revenue and reputation.
There was an immediate need to improve resilience capability, in terms of the core technical setup and geographically across global operations.
The FSI made the decision to migrate to a new cloud platform with capabilities better suited to the needs of a scaling business. There was a timeline of 6 months, ahead of the annual code freeze. This gave a six-month window to migrate the entire IT estate.
Amdocs worked closely with the FSI from the outset, conducting a migration readiness assessment to determine migration goals and align them with business objectives. AWS was ultimately selected as the new cloud provider due to its breadth of services, focused programs for cloud-native start-ups and ongoing technical support.
At this stage, the FSI required an experienced and trusted AWS partner to help execute the cloud-to-cloud migration quickly, seamlessly and without customer disruption. Amdocs was chosen, based on our proven reputation in complex cloud-to-cloud migrations and experience working with cloud-natives in payments transfer and PCI compliant environments.
“Amdocs identified and articulated the challenges we were likely to face, then showed how they could be mitigated with a dynamic and tailored migration strategy. Better still, they had the skills and insight to help us make the most of the new environment quickly.”
Evolving the IT estate for a quick and seamless AWS migration
Amdocs provided a team model for delivery and engineering work during the migration. This meant we could react flexibly as activity progressed and challenges arose, pivoting, adjusting, and supplementing our tasks to support the FSI’s own engineering teams as needed.
For the most part, the migration strategy we developed was rooted in application refactoring. The legacy application was using cloud-native services with tightly integrated code, so this had to be carefully unpicked to facilitate a seamless transfer to AWS. Our approach also encompassed the creation of CI/CD pipelines, code abstraction, containerization and database migration.
Key elements of the work included:
1. Code abstraction
We provided code abstraction to enable deployment of applications from the legacy cloud services into mapped AWS services. Generic code abstractions allowed for the creation of a shared library for multiple applications which can also be called upon for future use.
2. Microservices and containerization
Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services) was used for the migration of Service Bus, Web Apps and .NET applications. It was then implemented for the deploy and management of containerized applications at scale across multiple AWS Availability Zones.
Using multiple containerization services – Amazon’s ECR (Elastic Container Registry), ALB (Application Load Balancer), Permeameter and Secrets Store – carved a pathway to a microservices architecture. These services offered better cost-efficiencies than legacy deployments and reduced risk of outages by restricting the blast radius of faults to smaller cells. This enhances platform resilience, improving availability for end users.
3. Major database migration
A focal point of the strategy was a major MSSQL Server database migration. We handled this using Amazon DMS (Database Migration Service) along with File Gateway to provide consolidation for file transfers. Cloud Endure was also used for the migration of legacy resources into AWS.
The FSI’s security team stipulated that a CIS hardened image must be used for MSSQL EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances in AWS. However, since the relevant images were not available on AWS Marketplace at that time, the business faced a potential $1.2million bill for the procurement of enterprise MSSQL licenses. To get around this, Amdocs collaborated with AWS to create a bespoke CIS AMI with the necessary licenses. This enabled a monthly pay as you go approach, saving The FSI around $1million in upfront costs.
Storage, legacy applications and monitoring
We used a wide range of AWS services and tools to reduce friction during the migration as well as to minimize toil and facilitate modernization after the migration. These included:
- Storage – AWS tools and services such as S3, EBS, ECR, DynamoDB and RDS were selected to handle MSSQL and MySQL. This use of managed technology reduced the administrative overhead for the FSI’s internal support teams.
- Legacy – Use of Amazon EC2 enables the FSI to benefit from the elasticity of cloud services to increase resilience of legacy applications. It also opens the pathway for faster refactoring of these application in the future.
- Monitoring – Amazon CloudWatch gives access to additional metrics and increases visibility on applications. This facilitates a deeper view into the the FSI estate, providing a baseline for better application understanding so teams can react quickly to make improvements.
As an AWS partner with experience orchestrating Well-Architected Reviews, at every stage of the process we ensured work met current Well-Architected standards.
A quick, seamless migration with added benefits
Large scale cloud migrations have a tendency to overrun and break the budget. Our team model ensured this wasn’t the case for the FSI’s transition to AWS. We worked intelligently and strategically, deploying resource effectively as the migration unfolded.
Despite the scope and scale of the task, we completed ahead of the mid-December code freeze deadline. What’s more, the expertise and insight of our engineers and consultants meant we could identify opportunities to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of future activity in the new environment. We ensured applications were primed for ongoing modernization. And we helped the FSI save around $1million in upfront costs through our collaboration with AWS to devise a pay as you go alternative to the procurement of enterprise MSSQL licenses.
Immediate benefits associated with the migration include better resilience within the platform and better geographic resilience across global operations. This has a direct and positive impact on the FSI’s bottom line, reducing lost earnings associated with outages on the legacy platform.
With better platform stability, less time needs to be spent resolving simple issues and faults, which means the FSI has more time for innovation and invention. This capability is further strengthened by the new AWS architecture which provides additional space for experimentation and reduces the associated risks by minimizing the blast radius if things go wrong.
The move to AWS also enabled us to develop advanced security standards rooted in a predictive and proactive approach. Regular alerts enable the FSI to keep ahead of emerging threats and financial industry requirements, then take steps to address them at an early stage.
All these benefits add up to a much-enhanced customer experience. Users can be confident that the platform will be available for fast and secure money transfer when they need it. And the FSI can progress and refine new features aligned with customer insights and feedback more quickly.
“This was a large-scale, high-risk migration. But Amdocs’s advanced technical capabilities and a strong cultural alignment between our businesses ensured a positive outcome.”
A better way to send money
The FSI embraced its cloud-to-cloud migration as an opportunity to improve and modernize systems, maximizing agility and putting the customer at the heart of everything.
While the business was ‘born in the cloud’, technologies have evolved significantly since its launch. The move to AWS facilitated a thorough review of what was needed in the new environment, enabling the business to streamline its infrastructure, improve governance and manage ongoing costs more strategically through better tagging.
During the migration, decisions were regularly shaped by the FSI’s longer-term plans and goals, such as becoming cloud-agnostic and a future rewrite project. Steps that have been taken now will make it easier to achieve these objectives when the time comes.
With Amdocs’s support to streamline the AWS migration and maximize the associated benefits, the FSI is well-placed to continue as market leader in the international remittance space.
