AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
How Wipro’s Cloud Studio Accelerates Application Migration and Modernization on AWS
By Sameer Nadaf, Leader, Cloud Studio, IDEAS Cloud Transformation Practice – Wipro
By Gagan Sethi, WW Migrations and Modernization Solutions Architect – AWS
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Business leaders have long understood the importance of being up to date with technology, and operational modernization, DevSecOps, and cloud transformation are becoming core pillars of application development.
A successful digital transformation stands on a strong foundation of effective application modernization. This is made possible through a blend of people, process, and technology, along with the transformation drivers being governed and run carefully.
Wipro has made sustained investments to ease cloud adoption and cloud excellence journeys for customers. Wipro Cloud Studio brings together the discovery, assessment, migration, modernization, and transformation suite of capabilities.
In this post, we will showcase the discovery, assessment, and mass migration capabilities of Wipro Cloud Studio as evidenced in a customer migration journey to Amazon Web Services (AWS). We’ll also explore how it helps solve customer challenges to accelerate application migration and modernization.
Wipro is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with multiple AWS Competencies, including Migration Consulting. Wipro is also a member of the AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) and Well-Architected Partner Programs.
Setting the Stage for Application Transformation
Pre-work is necessary to understand the needs of the applications before moving forward with any organization-wide transformational journey. Long-term IT strategy should be backed by a strong business case considering the organizational goals and objectives built over a deep understanding of application and infrastructure landscape.
Wipro Cloud Studio is a suite of tools and processes presented in an integrated control center user interface (UI), all aimed at accelerating a customer’s cloud adoption journey.
Through this suite, Wipro helps customers in re-imagining, modernizing, and transforming their business processes and IT portfolio on the cloud with R-lane (re-host, re-factor, re-platform, re-place or re-architect) bucketing enabled by a highly automated and industrialized delivery model.
Wipro Cloud Studio houses unique capabilities that bring in integrated platform, skilled cloud experts, and proven tools and methodologies hardened for enterprises, all together in a single delivery model. Wipro Cloud Studio helps customers through smaller pilots to large mass migrations of various application portfolios.
IT leaders typically need a partner who enables security, reliability, and faster adoption to cloud, and which helps them realize the maximum benefit by creating customized cloud strategies. Wipro Cloud Studio helps businesses to assess, strategize, and accelerate cloud adoption through an industrialized delivery model.
Figure 1 – Wipro Cloud Studio capabilities.
Customer Use Case
Let’s discuss a specific case of a Wipro customer in the North American markets. The customer had undergone a strategic de-merger, and wished to reduce its application footprint, separation costs, and ongoing run costs for applications and migration of the de-merged business unit.
The key asks were to efficiently manage time constraints around the de-merger, migrating applications with minimal business disruption, and protecting sensitive IP while preserving service levels.
Wipro Cloud Studio was leveraged right from the start of the engagement all the way through discovery and assessment of the customer’s existing IT portfolio for identifying the right treatment strategy for each application.
The Process
Wipro proposed the adoption of a standardized methodology to achieve aggressive discovery and meet operationalization targets for the customer.
Wipro Cloud Studio’s assessment module combines an automated IT portfolio discovery engine with a survey of business and IT stakeholders to collate portfolio data. This is then run through the platform’s analytics engine to present what-if scenarios and migration recommendations.
Figure 2 – Wipro Cloud Studio discovery and assessment framework.
In this case, Wipro Cloud Studio was integrated with the customer’s configuration management database (CMDB), ServiceNow, and in parallel leveraging AWS tooling such as AWS Application Discovery Service for dependency mapping, and AWS total cost of ownership (TCO) tools like Migration Portfolio Assessment for right sizing and right pricing of workloads.
Complexity scores for the following metrics were calculated in real-time as incremental data was ingested:
- Application modernization opportunity
- Integration complexity
- Security complexity
- Data management
- Deployment complexity
- Technology and platform compatibility
The industrialized framework breaks applications across metrics and buckets to help organizations make informed decisions. Wipro lays its focus on application architecture, infrastructure, and integrations between the components.
Some of the key metrics considered in this use case were:
| Metrics | Simple | Medium | Complex |
| App modernization | Legacy technology – No | Legacy technology – No | Legacy technology – Yes |
| Integration complexity | No app dependencies File system usage to read/write data – No |
App dependencies File system usage to read/write data – No |
App dependencies File system to read/write data – Yes |
| Security complexity | Authorization on app database | Authentication on SSO Authorization on LDAP |
Authentication on SSO Authorization on LDAP |
| Data management | Low data volume No shared database |
Medium data volume Shared database |
High data volume Shared database |
| Deployment complexity | High availability and scalability – No | High availability and scalability – Yes | High availability and scalability – Yes |
| Technology and platform compatibility | Latest tech stack | Tech stack – in between | Old tech stack which needs upgradation |
The Outcome
Wipro Cloud Studio provides a dashboard of application dispositions across R-lanes, migration waves, and pattern recommendations. These recommendations are iteratively fine-tuned for each business unit based on factors like application criticality and business roadmap.
The dashboard also creates a budgeting view to show an indicative cost of hosting each application on AWS.
Figure 3 – Cloud Studio portfolio analysis view.
This capability extends to provide what-if analysis for an application by the chosen R-lane and indicative cost. This proved to be useful for customer business units in building application-specific business cases for re-host vs. re-platform or re-architect decisions.
The tooling also produces a report of the current state for each application, and the recommended set of patterns to be applied on its migration journey. This helps in creating short and long-term roadmaps for each application, and in aligning the application to the right migration train on the portfolio wave plan.
Wipro’s outcomes include:
- Reports on infrastructure and application discovery.
- Individual application assessment report built by tool with an outside-in perspective.
- Patterns observed in the technical stacks for pace layering of applications.
- Right-sizing and right-pricing of workloads on AWS to model customer scenarios and generate data for business case analysis and migration planning.
- Business case by esteemed professionals to align with IT with long-term organizational goals.
Figure 4 – Wipro Cloud Studio recommendations.
Wipro Cloud Studio Accelerators and Delivery Model
Wipro leveraged AWS CloudFormation to model, provision, and manage resources by treating infrastructure as code. This helps maintain the quality of infrastructure management and reduce deployment time.
Leveraging its deep experience with AWS solutions, Wipro built a pattern marketplace over AWS for infrastructure, applications, data, and DevSecOps using various AWS services. These reusable scripts are triggered by customizable variables to accelerate time to market, and helps enforce consistency, documentation, source control, and cost-effectiveness.
Wipro has proven patterns around Java workloads upgradation, .NET workload upgradation, database migration (both homogenous and heterogenous), stored procedure migration, and mainframe modernization.
Wipro leverages AWS tools like AWS App2Container for modernizing Java and .NET applications into containerized applications while standardizing the deployment and operations through Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS).
Similarly, Wipro leverages AWS Porting Assistant for .NET framework application analysis and port to .NET core on Linux, thereby reducing the manual effort involved.
Figure 5 – Cloud Studio pattern marketplace.
Finally, once the applications are identified for various treatment for R-lanes, Wipro Cloud Studio’s factory model helps expedite the overall migration journey in order to get faster time to market and time to value.
Wipro has a well-defined, proven factory-based model for application migrations that covers the entire migration lifecycle from prerequisites, migration readiness, migration planning, migration execution, migration governance, and transitioning to operations.
Wipro Cloud Studio leverages AWS Migration Hub for consistent migration planning, running and tracking a portfolio of applications migrating to AWS. Migration Hub enables centralized tracking of migrations running across multiple migration tools like AWS Application Migration Service and AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), and fast tracks incremental refactoring of applications using refactor spaces capability.
The migration prerequisites and migration readiness are part of the preparatory stage, whereas migration planning, migration execution, and transition are part of the execution phase, as illustrated below.
Figure 6 – Migration and modernization factory model.
Key Differentiators
Wipro has observed significant time and effort savings for the assessment team, owing to the automated data collection, analysis, and reporting capabilities of the platform. This was evidenced in the sprint velocity, compared with similar engagements where the toolset was not leveraged.
Additionally, the what-if scenarios gave application owner teams real insights into their portfolio, with critical information to strike the right balance between saving costs with cloud adoption and prioritizing re-architecture investments into applications that would yield the highest business benefit.
The following table outlays the productivity gains through standardization of tools, patterns, and process during large migration initiatives. Using Wipro Cloud Studio-based application migration and modernization, customers can realize better time to market with significant gain in effort saving as application volume increases.
Benefits
To briefly call out the key benefits of onboarding the cloud journey together, Wipro helps customers to realize:
- 3-5x faster cloud adoption
- ~30% reduction in average cost spent
- ~90% automation post migration
- 2-3x faster business acceptance
- 3-4x faster time to market
- Business continuity, resilience, efficiency, and agility in operations
Conclusion
Application transformation is a dire need across many organizations, and IT leaders need a trusted and experienced partner who can quickly understand their landscape and help realize benefits throughout the entire transformational journey.
Wipro FullStride Cloud Services for AWS combines cloud solutions with a high-touch, business-first approach to help companies accelerate their cloud transformation.
A one-stop shop to help you achieve seamless, efficient, and cost-effective end-to-end cloud migration and modernization, Wipro has extensive AWS experience, numerous certifications, awards, and proven customer engagements.
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Wipro – AWS Partner Spotlight
Wipro is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that harnesses the power of cognitive computing, hyper-automation, robotics, cloud, analytics, and emerging technologies to help clients adapt to the digital world.