EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Group 1001 is a leading financial services company that equips the next generation of insurance businesses with useful and intuitive solutions for life and annuity, health, property and casualty and specialty insurance. The company sought CleanSlate’s help because their core data infrastructure was housed in a third party data center that posed significant fiscal, operational and security risks. The company had also underinvested in its technology for many years, accumulating a significant amount of technical debt that needed to be addressed. The company was facing an expiring data center lease at the end of 2024, which meant much higher costs to extend, as well as possible overspending on their projected technology budget for 2025. While they knew a change was needed, the goal of becoming a cloud agnostic environment seemed overwhelming.

With a short timeline, CleanSlate was able to quickly jump in and implement a “Lift & Shift” program to migrate approximately 47 applications and 230 servers from their third party data center to AWS cloud in less than 100 days. CleanSlate set up a migration factory team that worked with Group 1001 to document their environment using C4 notation. This helped them transparently copy and migrate all their applications and data using proprietary AWS technology. The goal was to complete the migration so seamlessly that it was almost unnoticeable to their 1,500 users as well as the business community.

CleanSlate successfully implemented the migration through Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud (a.k.a. The Bubble). This allowed for a logically isolated virtual network within the AWS cloud. With complete control over IP address ranges, subnets and security settings, CleanSlate essentially created a “bubble” of Group 1001’s own private network within the larger AWS cloud. Once the “Lift & Shift” migration took place, CleanSlate immediately transitioned to a “Transform in Place” phase to make all the necessary security, operational and compliance improvements.

The project was a huge success and CleanSlate met and exceeded Group 1001’s expectations by completing the project in record time with minimal business disruption. The company was also able to save millions of dollars in operational costs, increase efficiencies and improve security measures, which was an invaluable benefit to the organization. CleanSlate helped position Group 1001 to continue their massive growth trajectory and remain competitive in the industry both now and in the years to come.

THE BURNING PLATFORM

Group 1001’s core data platform was built on a legacy system that was hosted by a third party data center, which was costly, inefficient and left them vulnerable to security threats. In addition, the legacy platform was over 10 years old and was no longer able to keep up with Group 1001’s growing business needs. In fact, the company had experienced a security breach, which further accelerated their desire to make a change. If Group 1001 wanted to renew the contract with their existing provider, it would mean higher costs and overspending on the technology budget that was allotted for the following year.

While Group 1001 was experiencing massive growth, every time they needed to scale their infrastructure to meet the growing demands, it cost them. It was apparent that their current platform couldn’t scale with them nor could it meet their growing needs. The company had decided on a deadline to divest all workloads and infrastructure from their third party data center by the end of October 2024. This gave CleanSlate roughly six weeks to complete the entire migration project. CleanSlate rose to the challenge, as this need was driven by Group 1001’s budgetary needs and desire to modernize their architecture.

Migrating to the AWS Cloud was the perfect solution for Group 1001’s goals of moving to the cloud, modernizing their architecture, increasing efficiencies, cutting costs, improving security and much more.

MAJOR CHALLENGES & PROBLEMS TO SOLVE

● The lease with Group 1001’s third party data center vendor expired at the end of October 2024, with an extension significantly higher in cost, jeopardizing the remaining 2024 and projected 2025 budget for technology spend

● Multiple instances of ransomware attacks and other security breaches due to insufficient vendor controls and lack of internal security infrastructure

● Limited monitoring capabilities, which prevented proactive threat detection and response

● Difficulty in scaling the infrastructure to accommodate new portfolio companies, slowing down acquisition integration

● Lack of standardized processes across portfolio companies, leading to inefficiencies and duplicated efforts

SOLUTIONS

Group 1001’s platform consisted of a legacy infrastructure with outdated systems, which led to high maintenance costs and limited flexibility. The company also had difficulty adapting to modern technology due to its dependency on aging platforms.

CleanSlate assembled a high performing team of twelve consultants who had experience working on AWS cloud migrations. The team had a proven track record of success with architecture, engineering, testing and deployment. During the project, they were tasked with developing and testing migration patterns, leading the data center migration as well implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) Automation with DevOps processes.

By partnering with CleanSlate, Group 1001 utilized multiple technologies such as SD-WAN and AWS migration, which allowed them to replace outdated systems with a scalable, modern cloud solution. Through SD-WAN, Group 1001 could abstract away the network and have a cost-effective solution using ISP lines to connect any location over any transport type for any service to any deployment environment. By leveraging this new cloud infrastructure, Group 1001 reduced the need for on-premise maintenance, which resulted in much lower costs and more agility.

The next challenge Group 1001 faced was its high reliance on external vendors for critical functions like NOC, SOC and infrastructure management. Because of the lack of strong oversight, this led to poor performance and security lapses from third party vendors.

CleanSlate helped solve these challenges by bringing critical functions like NOC, SOC, server and database administration and service desk operations in-house to improve quality and oversight. CleanSlate helped Group 1001 establish internal governance and technology management teams to help monitor performance and ensure compliance with firm-wide standards.

Group 1001 also faced multiple instances of ransomware attacks and other security breaches due to insufficient vendor controls and a disparate internal security infrastructure. With limited monitoring capabilities, Group 1001 was also unable to proactively address security threats and respond to them.

CleanSlate helped Group 1001 overcome this challenge through the adoption of Monitoring as Code, which allows for real-time threat detection and response through a standardized, scalable approach. This strengthened Group 1001’s security posture by implementing internal SOC capabilities and reducing dependency on external vendors. CleanSlate also established stateful inspection from modern firewalls, IaC hardened landing zone patterns and micro-segmentation to further enhance Group 1001’s security measures.

Lastly, Group 1001 was unable to scale its infrastructure to accommodate new portfolio companies, which slowed down acquisition integrations. This lack of standardized processes across portfolio companies created inefficiencies and duplicated efforts.

CleanSlate helped Group 1001 solve this challenge through a mature CICD build and test process using Gitlabs and Infrastructure-as-Code, which enabled consistent, automated deployments across portfolio companies. This new technology helped facilitate rapid scaling like the company had never seen before. Additionally, CleanSlate helped the company establish standardized processes and architectures, which provided a cohesive foundation for accelerating new acquisition integrations.

With a partnership with CleanSlate, Group 1001 is now positioned to better meet its clients’ needs, continue its unprecedented growth and maintain a competitive edge both now and in the future.

SUCCESS METRICS

The Group 1001 + CleanSlate partnership delivered tremendous value through a customized data migration with AWS. CleanSlate was able to design and build a solution that creates value, resulting in improved business growth, customer retention and operational efficiencies. A few key outcomes from the partnership included:

● Customized a program to “Lift & Shift” the Group 1001 application portfolio housed in a third party data center to AWS cloud in less than 100 days

● Reduced annual operating costs by millions of dollars by eliminating colocation server costs, third party vendor expenses and costly MPLS lines and equipment

● Gained efficiencies by reducing provisioning time for basic new servers from 6-8 weeks to 1 hour (via IaC)

● Improved problem detection time from days to almost real-time, due to new observability plan by insourced NOC

● Improved resource optimization by increasing or decreasing allocation of CPU, Memory or Disk went from 2+ months to overnight