The Story at a Glance
Group 1001, a fast-growing financial services leader, faced mounting infrastructure costs, security risks, and scaling challenges as their aging datacenter and VMware licensing became unsustainable. With their datacenter lease expiring, the company partnered with CleanSlate Technology Group (CSTG) to execute a seamless migration of VMware workloads to AWS — all in under 100 days, resulting in millions saved, faster provisioning, greater agility, and a future-proof foundation to support growth in a competitive industry.
What Had to Change
High Infrastructure and Licensing Costs
Group 1001’s lease with a third party data center was about to expire and an extension proved to be extremely costly and lacking in security provisions. This coupled with increasing prices of VMWare licensing limited their ability to invest in innovation that could help build efficiency or growth into their business.
Lack of Scalability and Flexibility
Since Group 1001’s existing data infrastructure lacked flexibility, there was difficulty in scaling the infrastructure to accommodate new portfolio companies, which slowed down acquisition integration. This led to legacy bottlenecks in onboarding and resource allocation, which ultimately meant higher costs and a lack of cohesiveness.
Modernization Needs
Group 1001 was looking to modernize their legacy datacenter to be modern and take advantage of the scalability and reliability of the cloud and wanted to make progress in a cloud strategy.
How CleanSlate Responded
Infrastructure Modernization
CleanSlate partnered with Group 1001 to help migrate their legacy VMware on-premise to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform. This transition led to much more data flexibility and resilience from the start, eliminating many of the issues they were facing. By implementing Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and automated pipelines, this reduced the manual effort that was required and made deployments much easier.
AWS Modernization
The move to AWS and modernization has helped reduce the need for VMware and has significantly reduced the licensing spend and the cost increase with the new licensing models. Standardization Group 1001 utilizes Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to manage and provision their infrastructure using code instead of manual processes. By having standardized processes and architecture across all Group 1001’s portfolio companies, this minimizes the complexity they faced before and reduces redundancies.
Automation of Key Processes
CleanSlate helped Group 1001 implement CI/CD pipelines, which enable continuous delivery and faster deployment of updates, ensuring that systems are always secure and up-to-date.
What Changed
CleanSlate successfully achieved Group 1001’s aggressive goal of implementing a new, modern cloud architecture and data migration before their existing data center contract expired.
CleanSlate established a program to “Lift & Shift” their entire application portfolio through AWS ’s proprietary technology in less than 100 days. The migration was completed successfully with zero disruption to its customers and trading partners.
By making the choice to partner with CleanSlate and through the use of AWS technology, Group 1001 was able to increase operational efficiencies for its portfolio companies, boost security measures and achieve significant cost savings.
The foundation CleanSlate laid for Group 1001 positions them to grow and become more efficient in multiple areas. These are the following pathways that AWS offers to prove a proven and structured approach to modernization:
- Relocate - Move infrastructure to the cloud without purchasing new hardware, rewriting applications, or modifying your existing operations.
- Rehost - Move an application to the cloud without making any changes to take advantage of cloud capabilities.
- Replatform - Move an application to the cloud and introduce some level of optimization to take advantage of cloud capabilities.
- Refactor - Move an application and modify its architecture by taking full advantage of cloud-native features to improve agility, performance and scalability.
The move to a modernized cloud platform enables Group 1001 to continue the exponential growth they are charting and positions them to lead the competitive insurance market both now and in the future.
Cost Savings
Group 1001 saved millions in operating costs due to:
- Deprecation of high cost MPLS lines and equipment
- High cost, low server outsourcing arrangement
- Colocation costs for servers that were no longer required
- Reduction in VMware licensing costs
Efficiency Gains
- Provisioning time for basic new servers went from 6-8 weeks after approvals to 1 hour via IaC
- Problem detection time went from user calls days after the incident occurred to near real-time for infrastructure managed by new observability plan watched by insourced NOC
Resource Optimization
- Increases or decreases in allocation of CPU, Memory or Disk went from 2+ months to overnight Platform Modernization
- Accelerate modernization and enhancement of technology platforms with DevSecOps assistants
Ready to Move Forward?
Start with a structured assessment of your environment, priorities, and constraints. CleanSlate can help turn that into a practical path forward.