Accelerating Success with Ongoing Cloud Managed Services 

First Merchants was in an aggressive growth and acquisition mode, but their legacy operating model was unable to efficiently take on the various platforms and workloads of the financial institutions they were acquiring. They wanted to extend their data center to quickly start leveraging cloud operating models that modernized their technology approach, with the goal of eventually working their way into the cloud over the next 3 to 5 years, while also having a data center footprint by employing a hybrid cloud model. AHEAD’s relationship with First Merchants began with a two-day visioning workshop during which it was discovered that an agile, native AWS approach was much better suited to their business, operations, and budget. 

Through close collaboration, AHEAD was able to expedite the cloud journey due to the increased knowledge and skillsets of the combined teams. This allowed the AHEAD team to reallocate those dollars and quickly shift the project focus to accelerating the migration-strategy phase. AHEAD also recommended SCPs for limiting deployment to approved Regions, and implemented a strategy for deploying users and roles for SSO configuration. 

AWS Cloud Foundation that Enables Scalability 

Credit Acceptance Corporation (CAC) has a loan origination app that makes up a significant portion of their business. This busiest part of this business happens during the same time as tax return season. In order to meet demand, CAC wanted to scale to a higher quantity of loan origination requests, but their data center infrastructure was limiting their scalability. Through a series of discussions, AHEAD determined CAC’s success criteria and built a design for their cloud foundation in AWS. This POC included operational best practices, a new, container-based architecture for the application, and an assessment of their security’s current state and how they could elevate their level of security. 

With the proper cloud foundation in AWS, CAC is able to leverage AWS services and their scalability to meet the demands of their customers while protecting sensitive data. AHEAD continues to enable CAC through education and initiative acceleration assistance. 

Implementing VMware Cloud on AWS for DR

Mortgage Connect was closing one of their data centers with plans to relocate equipment to another location over 1000 miles away. The planned decommission, relocation of existing equipment, and testing of infrastructure would take many weeks. Mortgage Connect needed to ensure availability of the DR Horizon VDI infrastructure during the migration period. AHEAD was engaged with Mortgage Connect with only 21 days before the scheduled decommissioning of the data center.  

A fully functional Horizon VDI environment was successfully deployed in 9 days enabled by a working partnership between Mortgage Connect, AHEAD, and Fulcrum Point Technologies. This allowed for 3 days of testing and validation before the decommission of Mortgage Connect’s data center. As a result, this enabled Mortgage Connect to confidently spin down their on-prem DR VDI environment and rely on VMC in the event of a disaster. 

Building a Data-driven Business while Promoting Data Security, Regulatory Compliance and Scalability

Fifth Third Bancorp is a diversified financial services company, overseeing $207 billion in assets and operating 1,080 full-service Banking Centers across the midwestern and southeastern United States. Client was experiencing rapid growth causing them to  evaluate and scale IT capabilities, especially their ability to quickly derive business insights and make data-driven decisions across multiple areas of the business. The financial industry’s high regulatory compliance and cybersecurity standards added complexity and pressure to the situation.

AHEAD collaborated with AWS and Snowflake banking industry experts to incorporate a Financial Data Hub architecture to consolidate data on a single platform, with built-in, industry leading data security and compliance capabilities to harness Client’s enterprise data and deliver reporting and visualization tools to aid rapid, well-informed decisions. In addition, a pay-as-you-go financial model for cloud and storage provided affordable scalability.

Client is the largest automotive services company in North America, providing consumer and commercial automotive needs, including paint, collision, glass, vehicle repair, oil change, maintenance and car wash.

Client saw the opportunity presented by the public cloud to drive speed, agility and flexibility in their business. However, their enterprise workloads were deeply rooted in the datacenter, so they needed assistance understanding cloud migration impacts (and pitfalls), devising a proper migration strategy and securing the right technical resources to make the migration a reality.

As one of the largest providers of automotive roadside assistance and claims management services in the United States, the Client was struggling to manage and analyze commitments for their dynamic infrastructure and inefficiently scale their containerized and web-based services. After assessing Client’s situation, AHEAD identified Spot by NetApp to resolve Client’s scaling inefficiencies. The AHEAD and NetApp Spot teams identified and optimized 3 critical areas of Client’s AWS infrastructure to optimize EC2, containers and commitments. Client is now managing all web services with NetApp Elastigroup, adopting NetApp Ocean across ECS and using NetApp Eco to manage their entire portfolio of commitments, enabling them to save over $500,000 per year, with the opportunity to increase savings as more Spot instances are added.

FinOps-as-a-Service Delivers Significant Cost Savings via Cloud Optimizations

Client is one of the largest and fastest-growing global provider of sports technology. Since its formation in 2016, Client has completed 26 acquisitions of market-leading sports technology companies. Through multiple acquisitions, Client inherited sub-optimized cloud accounts and configurations, needlessly wasting thousands of dollars of cost each month.

AHEAD was asked to analyze and validate acquired firm cloud environments using AHEAD’s proprietary benchmarks and best practices to optimize workloads. AHEAD analyzed Azure workload subscriptions on a case-by-case basis to identify cost reduction opportunities. Using proprietary tools and methods, AHEAD extracted data and built a backlog of remediation tasks while monitoring workload changes to identify incremental savings. Based on Azure project success, AHEAD optimized Client’s AWS environment to drive even more savings.

Next Generation Data Analytics and Applications Powered by Integrated Data Environments

Client is a leading electric and natural gas energy company serving 3.4 million electricity customers and 1.9 million natural gas customers across Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas and Wisconsin.

Client has made digital transformation of their enterprise a strategic priority, to operate more productively, better serve their customers and future-proof their business. The Digital Operations Factory (DOF) is a program focused on data, analytics, and end-user cloud applications, which requires robust data integration between on-premise and cloud-based data platforms.

AHEAD was retained to architect, design, and implement a high-throughput data integration solution that binds on-premise platforms to newly established cloud-based data-centric functionalities. AWS-hosted Confluent Kafka ecosystem on VMWare Tanzu was selected and a production data pipeline was established between on-premise SAP and AWS S3 storage and Lambda to support the bi-directional transfer of key data.