Cognizant roadmaps move to cloud 2x faster

CAST Highlight enabled Cognizant to assess all 633 applications in less than 12 weeks and meet the aggressive three-month window their client set.

Challenge

Cognizant’s client decided to embark on a massive cloud migration of over 2,000 apps to AWS. The diverse portfolio included primarily custom software developed in multiple technologies. The initial plan was to rehost all apps to IaaS on AWS to cut infrastructure costs as soon as possible.

But the client VP was tasked with modernizing the apps to optimize cloud consumption costs and needed to complete this assessment in less than three months. He had a small window and needed help to rapidly assess this massive portfolio, accurately rationalize every app, and identify the right candidates for modernization.

Solution

Cognizant used CAST Highlight to speed up the assessment process, ensure accuracy, and meet their deadline. CAST Highlight automatically analyzed the source code of each app for cloud readiness, technical debt, and open source risks.

Cognizant was able to blend the objective intelligence produced by CAST with qualitative data by using the custom survey capability of CAST Highlight and easily tailor it to their existing assessment methodology.

They used this combination of objective and qualitative data to segment the entire portfolio into recommendation categories.

Results

Cognizant was able to assess all 633 apps in less than 12 weeks and meet the aggressive three-month window the client set.

The assessment included specific disposition recommendations for every app, identification of the specific blockers in the app code that needed to be removed, and an estimate on the effort required to modernize each. Without CAST, this process would have taken six-plus months.

Cognizant was also able to identify significant cost saving opportunities: eight percent of the apps were targeted for retirement and one app was targeted for replacement with a SaaS alternative.