The challenge
Our client’s existing payments platform hosted packaged business applications for multiple payment types. However, the platform was hosted on legacy on premise technology that was becoming increasingly expensive to operate and maintain, due to rising licensing costs, and the growing need for extended support.
Our client needed to migrate their payments applications to the cloud, recognising the advantages of a microservices-centric architecture. Yet redesigning existing payments applications to align with a microservices approach presented a significant, lengthy and expensive undertaking, therefore justifying the business case was challenging.
Our client needed an alternative strategy that would enable business applications to be migrated from on-premise to cloud infrastructure without the need to completely re-engineer. Given the business-critical nature of the applications being migrated, ensuring the implementation was technically feasible was crucial.
The approach
Icon was engaged to conduct a full analysis and Proof of Concept (PoC) for the migration, which involved:
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Conducting an analysis of the platform application and technology dependencies
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Defining the target design for decoupling each individual application
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Defining an approach to migrate to a container-centric design while retaining the existing application code
Icon also worked closely with the client’s engineering team to demonstrate the
technical implementation of the design, using the following method:
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Migrating an existing application to use the latest version of the client’s incumbent vendor integration software, which better supported containerisation
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Testing integration with other vendor software components that also needed to be containerised
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Deploying the application onto the target containerised platform
Solutions and benefits
The main solution concept was to containerise the existing platform business applications without major re-design. To achieve the buy-in of internal stakeholders, it was important to be able to demonstrate the solution concept was technically feasible.
To accomplish this, Icon analysed, designed, developed and then tested the solution concept of decoupling each individual business application on the payments platform, and migrating to a containerised platform, without any re-coding.
Icon also delivered recommendations for the overall target platform and migration strategy for each individual application. This validated that the approach was indeed technically feasible, enabling the client’s payments IT team to create a future delivery plan for the migration in a much shorter timeframe.
More banks are moving their services to the cloud to keep pace with evolving customer expectations and growing payment volumes. By working closely with the payments IT team, we were able to design and validate a strategy for swift cloud migration, while reducing the costs and risks often involved when transforming business critical payment applications.
Our unique contribution
Leveraging our extensive payments and cloud domain experience, we empowered our client with an alternative migration strategy that reduced the cost, risks and effort of migrating their payments platform to a cloud technology stack.
Beyond the design of the solution itself, Icon also worked in collaboration with our client’s engineering team and jointly proved the design concept by implementing and testing. This provided the confidence that was needed to move the solution swiftly from concept to production planning.
