Our client is a leading provider of wealth management services with nearly 20,000 employees worldwide. The business helps its clients navigate some of their most important financial decisions with best-in-class technology coupled with industry-leading advisors.

The client team was developing a new suite of customer-facing applications, to scale globally to support any new Fund Administration or Transfer Agency business requirements. Most of the client’s existing infrastructure operates in datacentres across Europe and the US and as part of this development, the executive team wanted to assess a move to public cloud as an alternative to the expense of building a new datacentre.

An obvious reduction in cost, more flexibility in reacting to customer demands and faster speed to market made public cloud a very attractive option.

The large wealth management corporate chose esynergy as a consulting partner to conduct the assessment and also understand the impact the organizational change that a move to the cloud would bring.

The esynergy team started the 3-month pilot project by assessing 181 applications based on two parameters: cloud-readiness and business value. An ecosystem which enables elastic scale up/down was set up which dramatically improved environment build time from four months to 17 minutes using native tooling, Terraform, Kubernetes and Kafka.

Agile processes and reporting structures were introduced and the team worked in two-week sprints delivering to business goals with absolute transparency.

Two complex high value business applications were deployed to a production-like cloud ecosystem as a technology demonstrator and to allow for inspection and testing against benchmarks. esynergy also established a set of foundational cloud security best practices building a zero trust security model.

The second aspect of the assessment addressed the organisational change requirement accompanying a public cloud adoption. The team conducted a significant array of stakeholder interviews, workshops and deep-dives into our client’s operating model, approach, mindset, tooling, skills, training, HR and business functions. That allowed the team to generate recommendations that would prepare the company in successfully adopting and integrating public cloud into their existing ecosystem.

In this short span of time the esynergy team assessed the entire application landscape, delivered an application migration plan and migrated two applications to public cloud for testing purposes. A business case and cost saving potential was identified contrasting Public Cloud against existing and investing in new datacentres.

In parallel to the technical discovery there was a focus on the cultural aspects that go along with a cloud adoption. Foundational organisational change elements and new ways of working were introduced and teams educated. The zero trust cloud security principles are being planned as a key element of our client’s new security paradigm.