Migrating VMware to AWS:A Financial Firm’s Journey to Modernization

Learn how CleanSlate helped Group 1001 by seamlessly migrating their VMware environment to the AWS cloud in less than 100 days - resulting in reduced costs, better security and operations.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

seamlessly-migrating-VMware-to-AWS-cloud

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.

Group 1001 is a leading financial services company that powers the next generation of insurance businesses. Its brand categories cover the spectrum of life and annuity, health, property and casualty and specialty insurance. A few of its customers include: Delaware Life, Gainbridge®, Clear Spring Health, and RVI Group, among others.

Group 1001 has seen significant growth and the trajectory is only expected to continue. Yet, the company wasn’t positioned well for the future due to its aging technology and outdated infrastructure that left them vulnerable to security threats and breaches.

VMware workloads have long been a cornerstone of many enterprise IT environments. However, as business needs evolve, many organizations are currently evaluating how best to run these workloads – whether to migrate to the cloud or to remain on-premises.

Group 1001 sought out CleanSlate to help them modernize their platform and migrate their VMware workload to the cloud to help support their future growth and give them a competitive advantage. A partnership with CleanSlate and Amazon Web Services (AWS) opened the doors for Group 1001 to see growth and efficiency across a number of areas including:

Streamlined operations, enhanced agility and more innovation while reducing technical debt
Ability to provision computing power on-demand to meet dynamic workload requirements
Better utilize resources which led to cost savings.

Through the CleanSlate partnership, Group 1001 was able to transform their VMware workloads with more than 200 AWS services available, including managed databases, analytics, serverless and containers, and generative AI, enabling them to build next-generation customer experiences, accelerate growth and drive operational excellence.

challenges

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.

Solutions

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.

Results

Increased

Efficiency – New server provisioning from 6-8 weeks to 1 hour via IaC

Optimized

Changes in CPU, Memory or Disk allocation went from 2+ months to overnight

Reduced

Operating costs by millions with new infrastructure

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
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