Benefits
Overview
IDEMIA Civil Identity provides driver related technology services to the Departments of Motor Vehicles (DMVs) across the USA, ranging from remote testing solutions to new driver knowledge validation, to in-office enrollment and issuance products for accurately capturing driver photo and issuing AAMVA (American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators) and REAL ID (a state-issued driver’s license or identification card that meets increased security standards). The company’s solutions are in over 45 DMVs across the USA, and the technology is active from the moment one enters a DMV, a knowledge test, and then all the way through getting one’s physical and digital credentials.
Before completing its modernization journey, IDEMIA first needed to migrate its VMware Cloud Foundation development and production environment to AWS. “VMware’s business model changing and our dependence on a proprietary architecture presented challenges in cost and agility,” said Srini Singaraju, VP, Engineering and Technology Transformation at IDEMIA. The company executed a multi-jurisdiction cloud migration spanning 16 state and federal environments in under 9 months — establishing a standardized, cloud-native operational model across its entire customer footprint. The migration saved 30% in operational cost, but IDEMIA still had a monolithic architecture based on .NET 3.5 for its certification services application.
About IDEMIA
Since its founding, IDEMIA has been on a mission to make the world safer through its deep-rooted experience in biometrics and cryptography. IDEMIA’s technology leadership makes it the partner of choice for hundreds of governments and thousands of enterprises in more than 180 countries, including some of the world’s biggest and most influential brands.
Challenge | Legacy Applications Building Up Technical Debt
IDEMIA’s certification services application had accumulated significant technical debt over two decades, resulting in performance challenges and service outages. The company faced security flaws associated with its legacy .NET 3.5 environment, and it experienced cost overruns from Windows licensing. “We started hearing customer complaints about security, compliance and performance, and they were asking what we were doing about it,” said Singaraju. One small software development task would take over 32 hours, multiplied over 25 DMVs it needed to deploy, and over 40 DMVs it serviced. “In today's fast-moving digital world, legacy technology isn't just outdated, it's a ticking time bomb for security, performance, and customer trust." IDEMIA engaged AWS ISV Partner CloudHedge to support assessments and modernization activities for the project.
A complete rewrite of its application would have taken months and impacted many of its customers, and that’s where IDEMIA’s modernization journey truly began.
Opportunity | Move to Microservices
IDEMIA chose AWS because it already used AWS services and valued homogeneity. The engineering team has a lot of AWS expertise, and another aspect is the reach of AWS across all of the customer jurisdictions that IDEMIA supports.
The company leveraged CloudHedge to drive the exit of its legacy monolithic architecture and migrate from .NET 3.5 to .Net 8.0, to address security related challenges and gain cross-platform capability as part of its transformation journey. The company chose AWS Transform for .NET to assist with the modernization via its compatibility along with the integration with CloudHedge, which supported a move to a microservices architecture running Linux lightweight containers in a secure environment, and migration to AWS GovCloud for security and compliance. “This is critical to us because every state DMV holds the data to the highest standards and we need to take utmost care,” said Singaraju.
Solution | AWS Transform for Migration to Open Source and Microservices
IDEMIA partnered with AWS to modernize its architecture using AWS Transform for .NET, migrating from .NET 3.5 to .NET 8.0 and transitioning from monolithic to microservices architecture across multi-Availability Zones. It used Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), services that IDEMIA previously could not leverage with its legacy architecture. “We started seeing immediate benefits by transformation using AWS Transform and getting to a containerized world where I can now leverage the power of auto scaling to solve the performance issues,” said Singaraju. Migrating to .NET 8 allows the company to move from a 32-bit architecture to 64-bit, making the application resilient, scalable, and reducing the total cost of ownership. "AWS Transform helped speed up .NET Framework to .NET 8 modernization by 4x and allowed the software to be hosted more efficiently and cost effectively on Linux versus Windows Server," said Peter Kenyon, Director, Software Engineering, IDEMIA Civil Identity.
The company used CloudHedge’s modernization platform to containerize the application on Amazon EKS, provided support on CI/CD pipeline updates, and then migrated its workloads to AWS GovCloud, which the previous architecture did not allow. Being on AWS GovCloud gives IDEMIA’s customers confidence because they not only trust IDEMIA; They know AWS takes security seriously. As part of its modernization journey, the company migrated its 48 Terabyte database from Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, realizing up to two times better write performance and consuming up to 20 times less memory, saving it 25% in operating cost.
Impact | Up to 40% Cost Savings with Cloud-Native Architecture
With its previous legacy architecture, IDEMIA had to over-provision its compute instances because it could not auto-scale the instances. 99% of the time, the company was under-utilizing its over-provisioned resources. “In the context of over 20 DMVs we had to take care of, we were not using most of the resources over 90% of the time and they were wasted,” said Singaraju. The company immediately saw benefits using AWS Transform by moving to a containerized environment where it can leverage the power of auto scaling.
"AWS Transform helped speed up .NET Framework to .NET 8 modernization by 4x and allowed the software to be hosted more efficiently and cost effectively on Linux versus Windows Server." - Peter Kenyon, Director, Software Engineering, IDEMIA Civil Identity
IDEMIA experienced:
Application transformation— 4X faster
Service outage recovery time— Minutes (versus hours previously)
Windows licensing cost— Up to 40% savings from running Linux containers on AWS compared to Windows
Database operating costs— 25% savings
Total cost of ownership— 30% TCO reduction
Improved security posture— Support for latest security standards in .NET 8
Despite being such a large organization, the DNA of AWS, being customer obsessed and epitomizing the leadership principles, even in the services that they offer, treating a startup and a Fortune 10 with the same amount of care is something that surprises me.
Srini Singaraju
Vice President of Technology Transformation at Idemia Civil IdentityAWS Services Used
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