Bionic Helps F50 Financial Services Provider Modernize Its Applications
Gaining Visibility into Complex Application Environments
As one of the largest financial services companies in the US, this organization offers hundreds of apps that are in use by millions of people. These apps were monolithic and based on-prem, which made them difficult to update, hard to operate, and expensive to scale for the company. It was time for them to undertake a cloud modernization, but that was going to pose some significant challenges.
A cloud modernization requires a deep understanding of each application architecture’s dependencies, data flows, and cloud-native barriers. Since this knowledge isn’t documented anywhere, the only way to obtain it is by manually compiling it—a process that requires substantial investments of time, effort, and personnel. This is not scalable.
As the company’s platform engineering teams began manually documenting the architectures, dependencies, and data flows behind its digital services, they immediately ran into difficulties. First, the time-consuming and labor-intensive task was taking the platform engineering teams away from other valuable objectives. Second, with new changes to the company’s apps being pushed into production daily, by the time the team had finished charting the app environments, the information they had gathered was already out of date. Additionally, the company had no way to ensure that further development would adhere to its goals in the cloud.
The company grew concerned that they would be stuck indefinitely in a never-ending process of cloud modernization, with the costs adding up higher and higher. Bionic changed all of that.
The Solution: Bionic Cloud Modernization
To cut through the modernization roadblocks, the company turned to Bionic. Bionic is an agentless solution that inventories entire app environments, eliminating the laborious and time-consuming process of cloud modernization.
Bionic provided the team with deep visibility into all the applications’ dataflows and dependencies, tracked the modernization progress, and implemented CI/CD guardrails to make sure developers’ work aligned with cloud-native goals.
“IT teams are dealing with increasing complexity. By adopting Bionic and understanding how our applications are architected, we accelerate our modernization efforts and reduce operational risk,” is how the Bionic solution was described by the company.
“Being able to see all of the dependencies and the dataflows between applications and databases are worth their weight in gold.”
Chief Information Officer of National Financial Services Company
The Results: Increased Agility and Reduced Time-to-Market
Using Bionic, the company mapped its applications to identify modernization barriers, track the modernization progress, and ensures developers stay aligned with cloud-first objectives by deploying guardrails in the CI/CD pipeline.
Mapping the Applications
Bionic automatically provided the platform engineering team with full visibility into the application architecture, dependencies, and dataflows. With this information, they determined which of their apps needed to move to the cloud together to maintain operational stability, as well as the modernization barriers of each application (state persistence, hard-coded parameters, chatty interactions, etc.). Bionic continues to guide the company as they break their monolithic applications into microservices.
Tracking the Modernization
The company’s application modernization project is moving forward smoothly and successfully. Running Bionic continuously, the company is able to track all of the modernization efforts and report on the latest changes, so the teams are always up to date.
Ensuring Cloud Objectives
Now, the company has the ability to set guardrails for developers in the CI/CD pipeline. This ensures that even new code continues to adhere to cloud-native principles.
How a Leading National Financial Services Company Modernized with Bionic
Industry
- Financial Services
Apps
- Hundreds of customer-facing and in-house applications
Key Challenges
- Gaining full visibility into an opaque application environment
- Mapping all the dependencies and dataflows was time and cost-intensive
- Identifying cloud-native barriers of applications
- Constantly changing application environments
- Inability to enforce cloud-native standards
Solution
Bionic’s agentless solution helped the organization gain control over increasingly complex applications so they could be managed, operated, and secured faster and more efficiently.
Results
With Bionic, the company dramatically accelerated its modernization journey and reduced operational risk.
- Identified the barriers to modernizing the company’s applications.
- Tracked the applications’ modernization to report on progress.
- Helped developers maintain cloud-first principles for new and legacy apps.