CASE STUDY
Accelerating NCR Digital Banking out of the Data Center into the Cloud
The Challenge
Meet schedule and service quality requirements
The Client:
NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) is a leading software and services-led enterprise technology provider that operates in banking, retail, hospitality, telecommunications and technology segments worldwide. Head-quartered in Atlanta, Ga., NCR has 38,000 employees globally.
The Goal:
NCR decided to leverage the public cloud to transform their Digital Banking products which were running out of data centers. Planned benefits included: better serving their customers by speeding up development; increasing service quality and enhancing architectural support through simplified delivery processes; accelerating data science by opening new doors for data-driven user experience.
The Challenge:
At issue was the migration schedule; there was not enough time to fully transform the applications to leverage the target benefits before the end of the data center lease. Service quality and system uptime could not be compromised during the migration process.
The Solution
Minimize change and protect service
Migration Acceleration Experience:
With a history of on-time and under-budget complex cloud migration projects, Cornerstone Consulting Group specializes in assisting companies and their cloud partners to accelerate migrations into the cloud. Cornerstone employs a variety of migration methods based on a data-driven understanding of business drivers to meet schedule and service requirements.
Program Governance:
NCR decided to leverage the public cloud to transform their Digital Banking products which were running out of data centers. Planned benefits included: better serving their customers by speeding up development; increasing service quality and enhancing architectural support through simplified delivery processes; accelerating data science by opening new doors for data-driven user experience.
Technical Approach:
Carrying technical debt into the cloud can be a difficult but necessary choice when time is of the essence – and for this program it was – but there can be diminishing returns if migrations are not completed quickly. Cornerstone’s approach to meeting the program’s service and schedule objectives was to ensure engagement from the legacy and cloud engineering teams to present migration options, ranging in levels of applications change from ‘lift-and-shift’ with tools like M4CE, to pipeline and application transformation.
The results
Digital Banking is running and supported in the Cloud
Customers in the Cloud:
Production workloads are running and being fully supported in the public cloud in less than a year with relatively few service issues given the age of the legacy infrastructure and applications. The Digital Banking Platform is being supported by an interim operational support model that leverages existing and new processes, teams, and tools.
An Eye on the Future:
As migrations began ramping down, planning for the next steps began ramping up: organizational transformation activities; accelerating the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and application support maturity; cloud cost optimization; clearing the various forms of debt that were intentionally brought into the cloud to achieve the aggressive data center exit schedule.
Partnership:
Cornerstone’s program governance model brought together internal NCR departments including Software Engineering, Product Management, Customer Services, Security, DC Hosting & Operations, NCR Professional Services, and Software Architecture along with the cloud provider’s Professional Services group and the delivery partner. These groups operated together as a fully engaged team – from engineers to senior executives – guided by and executing on the program’s guiding principles to “move fast and do no harm”. Every one of these teams operated at a sustained level of excellence to meet the program objectives. The program could not have met the business objectives without these strategic partners.
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