Thomson Reuters Modernizes Critical Windows-Based Apps Using AWS Managed Services

Thomson Reuters worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to migrate hundreds of applications and thousands of assets split across seven divested data centers to the cloud, allowing the company to meet the terms of a transition services agreement it signed when it divested its largest business unit, the financial data and trading business.

Many of the apps slated for migration were legacy applications that ran on Windows. “We took this as an opportunity to standardize and do some operating system upgrades, improving our overall security posture,” says Justin Wright, Thomson Reuters’ vice president of architecture and development.

Thomson Reuters had committed to a cloud-first approach but had not yet embarked on a migration of existing applications from its own data centers to the cloud. The company not only needed to figure out how to complete the migration, they also needed to do some modernization to ensure things like security and patching continued to work in the cloud. “Conducting discovery on that vast estate of legacy apps was a huge task,” says Wright. “We had to determine which apps to migrate first, then we had to make sure our teams were able to support them once they migrated. We tried to minimize the modernization, but we did complete operating system upgrades, version upgrades of Microsoft SQL Server, and minimal changes to routing and other third-party dependencies.”

Next, Thomson Reuters formulated a process it dubbed “permit to host,” which helped the company discover reusable architectural patterns and prioritize the order for which to migrate applications.

In parallel with the application discovery process, Thomson Reuters, working with AWS Managed Services (AMS), identified over one hundred infrastructure services and management tooling it needed to duplicate in AMS for the migrated workloads. “We didn’t have any standards for running migrated workloads in the cloud as this was never our intention,” says Wright. “This was where working with AMS helped simplify the number of things we had to worry about as they took care of them for us.”

All of this came together as Thomson Reuters, working with AMS, migrated and modernized applications quickly to meet the required timelines with minimal customer impact. “Having a team like AMS who was able to provide the infrastructure services and tooling for us made the program,” says Wright. “If we had to set up all of those tools and infrastructure services ourselves, we would probably still be doing it right now.”