Accelerating an Organization’s Full Potential Using AWS with bswift

Founded in 1996, bswift offers flexible, personalized, and intuitive experiences to help employers manage benefits enrollment, administration, and compliance. The company was a self-contained division of CVS Health when Francisco Partners, a global investment firm, acquired it in November 2022. During this transition, bswift needed to migrate its entire IT environment out of the CVS Health data centers to the cloud within 12 months.

bswift needed a solution that would facilitate a smooth migration without disrupting service to its customers. “During the migration process, we wanted to maintain our qualities of service and improve our ability to be agile and innovative,” says John Hansen, bswift advisory council member and chief technology officer during the migration. “As we explored our options, we ultimately chose to migrate to the cloud. AWS was the optimal choice out of the cloud providers available to us; its capabilities are extremely impressive.”

To help accelerate the migration, bswift engaged AWS Professional Services, a global team of experts that can help companies realize their desired business outcomes on AWS. The AWS Professional Services team worked closely alongside bswift, CVS Health, and Francisco Partners to plan and conduct the migration, providing guidance on best practices, tools, and strategies. This collaborative approach was instrumental in the project’s success.

The migration involved several steps. The first was the assessment of bswift’s existing environment using Migration Evaluator, which provides the insights that an organization needs to build a data-driven business case for migration to AWS. This includes building a migration business case, identifying areas to reduce costs, and developing a migration road map. With this tool, companies can take a snapshot of their current on-premises footprint to fine-tune licensing, view server dependencies, and gain visibility into multiple migration scenarios.

Using Migration Evaluator, bswift was able to capture an inventory of its IT infrastructure, including servers, CPU, RAM, and storage. Moreover, the company benefited from the tool’s recommendations on the optimal AWS instance types for each workload and potential savings from running on the cloud. Next, bswift used AWS Application Migration Service, which organizations use to move and improve on-premises and cloud-based applications. AWS Application Migration Service automated server conversions and replication, significantly reducing manual effort while providing bswift with options to optimize its applications. Using these solutions, bswift migrated hundreds of servers to AWS in 6 months, well ahead of its 12-month plan—all while minimizing downtime for users.

“Manually migrating our servers, data, and applications would have been a messy and time-consuming process,” says James Oryhan, senior manager of cloud engineering at bswift. “Rebuilding the servers on AWS, moving the data, and getting everything up and running would have taken much longer compared with using AWS migration tools and services, which significantly accelerated the process.”

The final production cutover was completed in 1 day, resulting in a seamless migration with no impact on bswift’s customers. The company also improved efficiency in the process. Using AWS, bswift reduced its server footprint by 29 percent while maintaining high performance, effectively doing more with less. Additionally, it reduced its monthly spend for cloud hosting by 35 percent. By migrating to AWS, bswift’s costs became more transparent, empowering the company to make strategic changes in its compute and hosting investments. As a result, bswift saved money by consolidating its environment and infrastructure architecture, thus optimizing its cloud resources.

The company is also in the process of decoupling its job scheduling platform from SQL Server, choosing to migrate to AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk, a service that deploys web applications. This will lead to an estimated 1.5 million US dollars in annual savings. By migrating to AWS, bswift has also shifted from a static capacity model to a dynamic one. It can use AWS services to add capacity during peak periods and spin down when this capacity is no longer needed, further optimizing resource usage and costs.

Using AWS services, bswift completed a complex cloud migration in a short period without impacting its 16 million customers. Thanks to the migration, the company was able to significantly optimize its infrastructure, leading to improved agility and substantial cost savings. By the end of 2024, bswift projects overall operational savings of 46 percent thanks to reduced hosting costs, optimized resource usage, streamlined environments, and the shift to more cost-effective AWS services.

More importantly, bswift now has a scalable and flexible cloud environment with advanced security features, a springboard for innovation. “By migrating to AWS, we can accelerate our innovation plans in ways that wouldn’t have been possible in the same time frame,” says Mitch Hood, chief information security officer at bswift. “Now that the tactical work of the migration is complete, we’re already seeing benefits from cost optimization and modernization. We’re excited to use more AWS services to unlock additional value for our customers.”

The company is also exploring ways to enhance its benefits administration technology with AI, reinforced by its internal philosophy that AI and people should always work hand in hand. It is experimenting with Amazon SageMaker, which is used to build, train, and deploy machine learning models for virtually any use case, and Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service for building and scaling generative AI applications with foundation models.

“This migration makes it easier for us to further modernize our applications using the vast services and capabilities that AWS provides,” says Becky Whitehead, executive vice president of engineering at bswift.