Decision making and Legacy Tech

The limitations of legacy technology and collocated IT infrastructure become increasingly disruptive to the business.  There are a lot of decisions that need to be made to architect and execute an enterprise, cloud-first strategy, that becomes the key enabler to greater overall business agility.  And making good decision facilitates innovation, operational resilience while also reducing. infrastructure costs.   

The journey to leverage cloud infrastructure and serverless computing to deploy innovative, cloud-enabled technologies begins with a good foundational approach:

• Find the right partner
• Build secure and well-architected infrastructure
• Integrating DevOps services at the start
• Take a data-drive approach from day one
• Make intelligent choices regarding legacy tech
• Utilize microservices in an iterative approach 
• Identify business critical processes
• Optimize business processes BEFORE migrating
• Layer in complexity over time (ie – AI, ML)

Here is how Gravicore utilized this approach the help one of our clients.

The right partner

Our client wanted to take an accelerated approach to cloud adoption. And because our client had no native expertise with Amazon Web Services, and needed an AWS partner with Mortgage and Financial Services expertise, Gravicore was a natural choice.  Gravicore’s leadership team alone has over 50 years’ combined experience in mortgage origination, servicing and capital markets.  Gravicore fuses financial services domain knowledge with technology delivery expertise to rapidly deploy innovative and highly scalable solutions.

“Gravicore’s partnership was a key accelerator of our technology transformation and an unquestionable contributor to its success. If you’re looking for opinionated solutions from a team that is fluent in both technology and financial services, start with Gravicore.” – Sergey Dyakin, CIO Celink

The infrastructure & Devops

Gravicore established a secure hybrid cloud environment, connecting our partner’s collocated data centers with a new AWS infrastructure. Then Gravicore architects and engineers worked alongside their technical team to accelerate the planning, configuration and automation of a well architected framework, supplementing AWS best practices with their own opinionated solutions. For example, as outspoken proponents of infrastructure as code (IaC) and “don’t repeat yourself” (DRY) software development, Gravicore leveraged Terraform by HashiCorp (an AWS Partner Network Advanced Technology Partner) as an efficient way to manage and provision infrastructure through code and eliminate duplicative backend code.

Gravicore also provided managed services for our client’s DevOps, establishing a variety of teams, processes and tools around cloud architecture, software development lifecycle (SDLC), continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), security operations (SecOps), site reliability engineering (SRE), release management and developer support. Establishing these processes enabled our partner to better serve customers with high-velocity deployment of both infrastructure and applications.

Breaking down data silos to enable data-driven decision making

To achieve its goals of greater business agility, operational and strategic insights and automation through data-driven decision making, our client required a complete re-architecting of its data management environment. Having accomplished full financial services data platform rebuilds before, Gravicore accelerated the transformation through its opinionated implementation of a modern data stack. Incorporating many AWS native services, the teams rapidly deployed a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), leveraging AWS Athena, AWS Glue and AWS Lambda serverless computing to build event-driven data pipelines and transformations feeding an enterprise data warehouse on the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Serverless computing enables faster deployments and reduces cost by automatically scaling resources based on event-driven demand with zero over-provisioning — welcome benefits for our client, whose month-end reporting activities generate spikes in computing demand.

Addressing Legacy Tech Iteratively with Microservices

With automated infrastructure and event-driven data management capabilities in place, further modernization of our client’s platform required integration to existing legacy systems and the redevelopment of business process management modules for servicing operations.

To mitigate risk and increase speed-to-production, we utilized an iterative, microservices-based approach that allowed our client to incrementally deploy new services as they became ready for business adoption. To date, our client and Gravicore have modernized more than a dozen technology-enabled workloads representing a comprehensive set of business functions.

To date, our client and Gravicore have modernized more than a dozen technology-enabled workloads representing a comprehensive set of business functions.

Optimizing External and Internal Process

First to launch was a Borrower Portal, an external, self-service web application where borrowers can access loan information, download account statements, submit requests for line-of-credit draws and initiate other account services. Before the portal’s launch, borrowers had to perform these tasks by calling a customer service center or submitting a request via fax, mail or email. With Gravicore’s support, our client took the portal from a concept to go-live in just 4.5 months.

With this automated, always-on portal newly available to borrowers, we helped our client turn their attention inward to address inefficiencies in business processes and deliver new, tech-enabled capabilities through the redevelopment of its core servicing system. Working closely with business stakeholders, Gravicore led delivery and adoption of our clients first ever effort to achieve full technology and business process reengineering.