Cloud Foundation Framework and Cloud Managed Services from Lightstream enable the company to modernize its mortgage lending application and deliver better service.
Business Challenge
The financial services industry is fast-moving and competitive. New SaaS entrants with easy to use applications have put pressure on traditional companies. Today, consumers have a vast array of choices, literally in the palm of their hand.
For one financial services company, addressing this business challenge meant modernizing its applications. For years, the company operated a traditional legacy IT environment. It owned its own data centers. Applications were monolithic tied to back-end relational databases. There was no cloud footprint or ecosystem.
Moving to the cloud offered many benefits: better scalability, faster application development, the opportunity to leverage microservices, and flexible infrastructure. But the company had limited experience with cloud computing.
The CIO reached out to Lightstream for help. The IT team had decided to modernize its mortgage lending application and deploy it in Microsoft Azure. To do that, they needed to architect a hybrid cloud environment that met all security and regulatory requirements for the financial services industry and ensure it remained compliant indefinitely.
Solution
Lightstream began by performing a Cloud Foundation Framework engagement. Cloud experts assessed the company’s existing infrastructure components (from compute/storage to bare metal devices), security and governance posture, and application portfolio. Then, they worked with the company to align its business outcomes with technical capabilities in Azure and created a design blueprint for the new environment.
The blueprint defined all the technical specifications required to extend the company’s on-premise environment into Azure. It addressed cloud configurations and platform governance, identity and access management requirements and integration, network and interconnectivity needs, security services, and operational processes.
Armed with the blueprint, Lightstream’s technical specialists then built the Azure environment. This provided a safe, compliant destination or landing pad for the company’s application portfolio migration.
To ensure ongoing compliance, the company selected Lightstream Cloud Managed Services—a comprehensive service offering that manages cloud security, spending, and technology—to oversee management and operation of its Azure environment.
Business Outcomes
Improved Governance and Security Posture
The Cloud Foundation Framework helped the company design its Azure environment to meet the strict security and regulatory requirements of the financial services industry. This improved their overall security posture and enabled them to deploy applications with confidence. In addition, Cloud Managed Services has enabled the company to improve governance over the new environment by providing operational expertise and proactive management to ensure compliance as new applications are developed and deployed.
Reduced Time-to-Market for Application Development
With a secure, compliant foundation built in Azure, the company was able to design and deploy a new mortgage lending application faster than it could have in a legacy environment. The Azure environment also provides the foundation needed for the company’s DevOps team to develop new applications to satisfy the evolving needs of their customers. This enables the company to deploy new services and capabilities faster, improve service to its existing customers, and attract new consumers.
Improved Operating Environment
Azure provides a number of improvements to the company’s operating environment. There is an improved communication landscape, reducing application latency and improving operational processes. And the new environment eliminates concerns over scalability.
Contact Information
To learn more about how Lightstream Managed Services can help your business build a secure hybrid cloud environment that will help you modernize your applications and improve customer experience, visit www.lightstream.tech/solutions/
