White Paper

Cloud computing has taken the technology Beyond the industry by storm, with enterprises of all sizes using it for a variety of advantages. Moreover, the ’s value proposition continues to evolve Cloud: Reaching beyond the early benefits of increased agility, lower costs, and faster time to market. Enterprises are now using the cloud to enable new business for Stratospheric models, boost revenues, and transform customer experiences in what has become a truly digital era.

Heights of Now that is “the new normal,” enterprises must get even better at it. That means using the cloud to create a foundation for digital Accelerated transformation and innovation, so they can adjust quickly to whatever new business opportunities Business and processes follow. This requires thinking about the cloud differently than a traditional , while maintaining some of the same disciplines that have guided IT for years.

How to leverage cloud better and The opportunities—and challenges—may seem faster than the competition as you daunting. These include determining which race toward digital transformation applications to put in the cloud and which ones to keep on premises, as well as identifying the legacy and business innovation applications that need to be rearchitected for the cloud. They can even take advantage of anything (XaaS), and stay current on the latest White Paper

Cloud may represent a significant transition for both IT and the business, and a successful pilot project can build internal political capital for future changes.

in technology trends such as AI/machine learning agile or cost-effective enough to meet the ever- and -of-Things applications. increasing demand for storing, analyzing, and predicting customer usage and buying patterns. Beyond technology, though, enterprises must There is a strong requirement for creating shorter grapple with how to make changes to ingrained feedback loops with a customer; this calls for an processes while maintaining security and agile cloud infrastructure. compliance. Other challenges include establishing DevOps to create more agility, addressing scalability, One increasingly popular method of tackling this launching new operating models, and establishing is through deploying an integrated process: tying cloud centers of excellence (COE) to create a together DevOps capabilities in IT, a cloud COE, virtuous circle of cloud expertise. and a native cloud (PaaS). This allows enterprises to match internal Changing Fundamental processes with the speed of deployment that Thinking About the Cloud cloud provides. All three concepts work together to ratchet up speed. Moving beyond fundamental cloud benefits requires thinking about the cloud in a new way. It’s easy to For instance, DevOps represents an improvement peg cloud solely as infrastructure, but it’s not. Cloud over traditional waterfall (or in some cases, even collapses the separation between applications and agile) software development for fast turnaround infrastructure, and enterprises can’t think about times. By establishing a COE, enterprises can one without considering the other. codify best practices for standardization and reusability that aid both scalability and automation. It’s a perspective that’s important to cultivate for success. Previously, when deploying applications, A cloud-based PaaS, employing what’s known as IT had to consider procurement cycles, capacity, micro-services architecture, allows development bandwidth, and physical security. The cloud gives teams to update not just applications, but enterprises the opportunity to leapfrog those services within those applications, enabling challenges. Freed from the expensive and continuous improvement. This also provides an time-consuming effort of buying—and managing— opportunity to rearchitect legacy applications, by physical infrastructure, IT can focus on improving essentially recreating them, service by service, in internal processes—and creating differentiation—in the cloud. Services resident in older applications order to be more nimble and responsive to business can exist in virtualized containers, while services demands. Via the cloud, IT can focus directly on for new applications can be added via an API call. customer requirements without waste or waiting. Fundamental Things Apply Aligning IT with customer requirements necessitates knowing what those are. Traditional infrastructure As significant a change as these options represent, and proprietary software tools are typically not some long-standing IT issues remain. Just as IT

Beyond the Cloud: Reaching for Stratospheric Heights of Accelerated Business | 2 White Paper Cloud computing helps businesses be better prepared and more agile when the next new opportunity comes along.

has focused on business alignment for decades, it IT and the business accustomed to cloud computing. should, in developing this application architecture, analyze the organization’s cloud strategy from a But there are other issues to consider as well, business and cultural standpoint. How can the both technology and resource related. organization use these new capabilities to boost The technological issues include: its competitive advantage, launch new business models, or increase customer engagement? • Enhancing enterprise architecture for tighter integration between application and As with any new technology, enterprises should infrastructure stacks choose a cloud transformation project that will give them a quick win, with high potential • Ensuring data security and compliance, both payback through cost savings, time to market, or in the cloud and in transit improved customer experience. Cloud may represent a significant transition for both IT and • Establishing adherence with privacy and the business, and a successful pilot project can sovereignty regulations based on build internal political capital for future changes. geographical location of cloud data centers

While the cloud lets organizations think more • Integrating or tailoring existing service- expansively, it also requires them to think more management tools and processes to granularly, especially when it comes to selecting accommodate either a public or hybrid projects for deployment. Start with current cloud ecosystem applications. Consider which of them should stay • Deploying, whether through building or internally hosted, which might go to the cloud, purchasing, a cloud management platform and why. The resource issues include: Begin by asking if an application is robust or independent enough to be moved wholesale into • Addressing the process of developing, testing, the cloud. Many applications aren’t—they require and bringing up to date smaller but faster some tinkering to overcome inefficiencies. Some updates may be too brittle or old and need to be replaced by a native cloud application. • Improving change management techniques and governance of micro-services to enhance The order in which applications are migrated is also reusability and avoid redundancy crucial. The best approach is to identify applications that have few interdependencies with other • Reconfiguring staff resources for migration, corporate applications, such as human resources by understanding both the impact to the applications or information-only corporate existing workforce and where new skills or websites (not e-commerce). This will help get both retraining might be necessary

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• Supplying technical support for new backup, and recovery measures; and improved applications performance at reduced cost. The result: 65% cost savings and a 34% improvement in website • Adopting accounting principles as IT performance. Also, Cognizant deployed proactive spending transitions from capital to security monitoring and alerts and established operational expenses defined processes for expediting further adoption of cloud services. The Payoff: Customer Success Stories Insurance Provider. Having grown through acquisition of multiple insurers, each with its own Sometimes enterprises are skeptical of new distribution strategy, this super-regional technology because there’s always another insurance holding company found itself saddled innovation coming along after it. But that, ironically, with technology debt. The company was using an is the payoff of cloud computing: As a foundational array of homegrown and commercial off-the-shelf technology for business acceleration, it gives software as a system of record. The IT and enterprises a competitive advantage. It helps them business leaders wanted to create a better digital to be better prepared and more agile when the experience for both customers and brokers with next new opportunity comes along. Think of how the following benefits: an immersive e-commerce many new, recent technologies rely on the experience, the ability to rapidly price and sell economies of scale that cloud technologies bring— policies, and faster handling of customer claims. customer-facing mobile applications for After lengthy consideration, the organization ridesharing, high-speed analytics applications that chose Guidewire Software (Guidewire.com) as its aggregate both structured and unstructured data, next-generation core insurance platform. Before and social networking, to name a few. deployment, it turned to Cognizant to assess its Creating competitive advantage is increasingly underlying infrastructure and determine if it was important because the nature of competitors is up to the task. Rather than execute a full data changing. Enterprises not only have to worry center refresh and expansion, Cognizant about traditional rivals, but also digital startups recommended running Guidewire as a service on and trendsetters that are dramatically altering the AWS. Not only would the company save the competitive landscape in nearly every industry. up-front capital expense, but it would also receive the ancillary benefits of scale, high availability, Consider these success stories from shared and simplified disaster recovery. The result: clients of Cognizant and Guidewire has now been in full production for (AWS) that have derived significant benefits from three months without a single outage or a well-designed and thoughtfully implemented performance issue. cloud transformation. Healthcare Information Exchange. A not-for- Biopharma Company. A leading biopharma profit member-based organization specializing in company required a more efficient, scalable, and administrative healthcare information exchange secure platform for hosting its multiple websites (HIE) found that its homegrown and proprietary and delivering content through them. Cognizant vendor solutions were increasingly inadequate. developed and executed a strategy for migrating Additionally, the regional exchange network the client’s applications to the AWS cloud that required a modern, flexible, and scalable included infrastructure design; proactive security infrastructure for its more than 50 member monitoring and alerts; business continuity, organizations. The HIE not only needed to reduce

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administrative costs, enable member innovation, as procurement and deployment, to more strategic and support advanced transactions, it also activities. They like swapping capital expenses for needed to migrate to a new infrastructure while operating expenses. They like the simplicity that still ensuring a high degree of reliability, security, software-as-a-service (SaaS) options provide. and HIPAA compliance. Cognizant migrated the client’s systems to the AWS Cloud, enabling the But others are looking beyond those basic cloud client’s members to use standards-based advantages to the expansive possibility of even communications protocols to process nearly 12 more stratospheric success—the ability to take million transactions a month. The migration was advantage of PaaS-based clouds and XaaS. Being seamlessly accomplished in less than three able to develop processes that let organizations months, with minimal downtime and service create, test, and deploy new micro-services and interruptions. Cognizant also established a virtualized applications potentially means achieving networking solution that enhanced security to new levels of speed, features, and end-user meet regulations for maintaining personal health engagement (both customers and employees). information (PHI) and payment card industry Just as mainframes provided a foundational (PCI) data in a cloud environment. technology for decades, cloud computing has the potential to provide a foundation for business What the Cloud Brings capabilities that will serve enterprises for a Many enterprises are jumping to the cloud for its generation. That’s why it’s crucial for enterprises basic advantages. They like the ability to move IT to start their cloud journey now. An experienced resources from so-called “utility” activities, such and reliable partner can help lead the way.

QUICK TAKE Four-week Cloud Accelerator Program

To help organizations get off to a great start with cloud, Cognizant and AWS have launched a four-week “Cloud Accelerator Program.” From initial cloud adoption to optimization, the program aims to smooth the transition to the cloud. This program involves:

• Discovery, evaluation, assessment, • Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and and classification of selected customer work backlog planning environment, systems, and applications • Migration roadmap to AWS • Identification of possible deploy- ment patterns (rehosting, refactoring, • High-level ROI/TCO study based on revising, rebuilding, replacing) using customer’s planned use of AWS Services AWS Services

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WHY COGNIZANT AND AWS? and managed services, with AWS’s cloud computing technology and services. The result: a Cognizant began working with the AWS platform in reliable, flexible cloud infrastructure that will drive 2008, making it one of Amazon’s longtime partners. business acceleration and digital transformation Cognizant’s designation as an APN Premier for the enterprise. Consulting Partner, Managed Service Provider, and Authorized Commercial Reseller is based on deep The companies’ collaboration is driven by the experience and exceptional service building robust common goal to serve joint customers by leveraging solutions across a large number of enterprises. Cognizant’s global delivery model with AWS’s This, along with achieving multiple partner scalable, reliable, agile cloud computing capabilities. competencies, is evidence of Cognizant’s global While AWS furnishes the building blocks of the cloud capabilities, which include a track record of helping architecture, Cognizant provides the differentiating a large number of enterprise customers run their integration strategy and expertise to create industry applications on top of AWS. and horizontal solutions to solve customer problems.

In this capacity, Cognizant combines its system LEARN MORE: integration capabilities, accelerators, frameworks, www.cognizant.com/aws and and toolkits, along with advisory, implementation, www.cognizant.com/Cloud

ABOUT COGNIZANT Cognizant (NASDAQ-100: CTSH) is one of the world’s leading professional services companies, transforming clients’ business, operating and technology models for the digital era. Our unique industry-based, consultative approach helps clients envision, build and run more innovative and efficient businesses. Headquartered in the U.S., Cognizant is ranked 205 on the Fortune 500 and is consistently listed among the most admired companies in the world. Learn how Cognizant helps clients lead with digital at www.cognizant.com or follow us @Cognizant.

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