CASE STUDY
Migrating banking software to AWS for Abrigo
Executive Summary
Abrigo, a leading provider of risk management, financial crime
prevention, and lending software and services, was ready to exit
its data centers. The company operated 1,500 servers that hosted
its banking applications used by customers across the U.S.
However, Abrigo’s technology team needed an architecture that
allowed them to act faster and scale. Adding on-premises
hardware to increase processing power was time-consuming and
took months of upfront planning.
To migrate its workloads—including critical SQL Server
functions—to AWS, Abrigo engaged AWS Partner Cornerstone
Consulting and worked closely with AWS Professional Services.
In 13 months, Abrigo had rehosted all workloads to AWS—just
before the company’s deadline to exit its data centers. Now
running on cloud-based services, Abrigo has improved service
performance by 25 percent, and the company can release new
products 50 percent faster.
Business Impact
Bringing New Products to Market 50% Faster
Now running on AWS, Abrigo can easily scale compute and storage—improving the user experience for its customers and boosting agility for its business.
On-demand compute from Amazon EC2 allows the technology team to move through batch processing faster each night so data is ready for its banking customers each morning.
Additionally, the lending application has a 25 percent faster time to first byte and time to last byte, resulting in an improved user experience.
Plus, with cloud services at the ready, Abrigo can quickly build new solutions to meet customer demand.
In just under six months, Abrigo released a new fraud detection product, which wouldn’t have been possible without the new Cloud-based architecture.
The Solution
Migrating to AWS and Defining Complex Architecture Patterns
As a first step, the team adopted the AWS Application Migration Service and AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery for data replication, helping to eliminate infrastructure dedicated to disaster recovery. This cut down the number of servers to 840. Next, they implemented automated scanning to truly understand their ecosystem, then reviewed the architecture to define migration paths and break down the timeline into 32 waves.
For the straightforward migration patterns, the team used what they call a “lift-and-shine” approach, where applications were transitioned to AWS and matched with corresponding AWS services, such as Amazon Elastic
Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), wherever possible.
“We were opportunistic about which AWS services to adopt and looked for drop-in replacements that would allow us to remove some technical debt quickly,” Perlewitz said.
Through a team effort, they migrated as many as 100 servers in just one
weekend, thanks to upfront planning and the AWS Application Migration
Service.
More Complex Applications
Abrigo worked closely with Cornerstone Consulting to determine roughly 50 custom migration patterns. “Cornerstone is an expert in defining reusable architectural patterns to solve complex problems
utilizing AWS services,” Perlewitz said. “They were our go-to for in-depth problem solving.”
In particular, Cornerstone Consulting helped develop database architectures based on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL so applications could run across multiple AWS Regions and deliver high availability.
Cultural Transition
Beyond supporting the technical side of the migration, Cornerstone Consulting was also instrumental in initiating a cultural transition at Abrigo.
“The engineering teams at Abrigo are highly motivated and passionate about new technologies,” said Suraj Talreja, managing partner at Cornerstone Consulting.
“We worked collectively and gained buy-in through small, upfront wins. By the end, it was great to see a re-energized group of engineers excited about the potential of the Cloud.”
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