HDB ‘likes’ public cloud
Chief Technology Officer of HDB Financial Services Mathew Panat provides information regarding the company’s cloud mitigation strategy:
Ravi Lalwani: In the last 12 months, which applications have you migrated from on-prem to the public cloud, and vice versa?
Mathew Panat: In the last year, we have migrated several applications from on-premises to the public cloud, including accounts payable, contracting systems, customer-facing mobile app, CRM for customer service and sales journeys, data lake, and the unassisted journey platform. Notably, the email platform and proxy solution, previously on-premise, have been successfully transitioned to SaaS platforms on the cloud.
The selection of applications for migration was based on factors such as unpredictable compute growth, the potential for leveraging cloud-native services, and scalability requirements. Key examples of applications migrated to the cloud include CRM and Data Lake.
Which applications have you migrated as-is, and which ones have you upgraded?
All the listed applications underwent a significant redesign during migration to leverage cloud-native services fully. The process also involved reconciling multiple footprints of each application to ensure the conversion of point solutions into unified platforms. For instance, Sales and Service CRM, originally separate applications, were migrated onto a single platform. This approach not only enhanced cost and operational efficiency but also simplified customer journeys and facilitated the reuse of common data and functionalities.
What are the key steps in migrating an on-prem application to the cloud?
The key steps in migrating on-premises applications to the cloud followed an Assess-Plan-Migrate-Operate approach. The on-premise solutions underwent assessment, considering factors such as architecture, business objectives for cloud migration, and essential levers like increased agility, cost efficiency, improved performance, enhanced scalability, functionality, and planned technology for the target architecture. A well-architected framework incorporating principles and best practices around operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability guided the design of the architecture and landing zone. The migration was executed in phases to ensure it did not disrupt ongoing operations and only proceeded after security and compliance checks. Operational Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) were defined, and tested, and specific cloud operations functions, such as cloud ops and fin ops, were established.
What are the key tools you rely on for cloud migration?
The key tools relied upon for cloud migration included native tools provided by the cloud provider, particularly for assessment and data migration.
Are the migration projects done by in-house teams or external providers?
Migration projects were undertaken through a combination of in-house teams and external providers. Additionally, cloud provider customer success teams and subject matter experts were involved as needed at every stage.
Which public clouds are you using, and for how long?
We have been using AWS India for the past 2 years as our chosen public cloud platform.