Case Study
Steamhaus is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and cloud-native consultancy focused on platform engineering, application modernization, and cloud migration.
The client is a UK-headquartered online trading and investment services firm operating regulated platforms for retail and institutional clients.
75
applications
analyzed across
10+ technologies
30%
reduction
in cloud
consumption costs
“Working with CAST, Steamhaus cut the time needed to collect and analyze the application portfolio by 95%, compared with a fully manual approach.”
Rob Greenwood
CTO
CAST Highlight provided automated portfolio insights and wave planning to accelerate AWS modernization, map applications to AWS services, and guide autoscaling improvements.
Challenge
A financial services firm operated 75 on-premises applications spanning more than 10 technologies across trading, risk, onboarding, and analytics. To improve agility, resilience, performance, and total cost of ownership, AWS and Steamhaus needed a clear migration and modernization roadmap.
Manual portfolio assessment would have been slow and resource-intensive, lacking the detailed insights required for wave planning, service mapping, open-source risk visibility, and optimization baselines.
Solution
AWS and Steamhaus partnered with CAST and used CAST Highlight to automatically analyze the client’s full application portfolio. CAST Highlight analyzed cloud maturity, grouped applications into migration and modernization waves, and mapped candidates to AWS managed services.
It also evaluated open-source dependencies and technical debt to surface risks, estimate remediation effort, and provide data-driven inputs for sequencing and program planning.
Results
On the trading platform, the team achieved a 30% reduction in cloud consumption costs by identifying the opportunity to use Amazon EKS authentication and implementing metrics-based autoscaling to stabilize login spikes.
Across the broader portfolio, they reduced application discovery and analysis time by 95%, accelerated migration planning, clarified wave sequencing, mapped applications to AWS services, and established effort baselines to support ongoing optimization.
