| | MAY 20198CIOReviewHow did you do it?" Perhaps the number one question I get asked when speaking about cloud migration at conferences, in interviews, to colleagues, and business partners. Everyone wants to know how to do it, but the more important question is "why?"When I joined ACI Specialty Benefits in 2010 as Manager of Information Technology, my team was a resident help desk and in-house geek squad. The biggest IT crisis of the day was keeping the lights on in the data center. ACI was in the process of finalizing their database and had dreams of turning the traditional business into a SaaS business model--but the server was stuck in a small closet with a makeshift fan, and IT was an afterthought.And then, boom! Business didn't just grow, it exploded. Founded in 1983 by Dr. Ann Clark, ACI Specialty Benefits began as an employee assistance program. By the time I joined, ACI had already grown into a top-ranked global EAP, Student Assistance, and Work-Life benefits provider. Then three significant forces converged to catapult ACI into a new direction: ACI went international, acquired two companies, and expanded offerings with new concierge benefits and 24/7 access to service. From a Benefits Provider to Technology Leader: A Digital TransformationAll of a sudden, IT was no longer an afterthought. ACI needed a scalable business model and new technology solutions to accommodate global growth, a growing demand for digital security, and integrating infrastructures from acquired companies. Instead of paper-pushing, we needed a more sophisticated way to enroll, incentivize, and deliver benefits in a convenient and globally-accessible customer-centric portal. Utilizing distributed ledger technology (blockchain), edge networks, wearables, microservices, and Internet of Things, ACI rapidly transformed into a technology-driven benefits leader covering over 12 million lives across 170 countries. In business, as in life, most people don't choose to change. Change happens and it is up to us to choose how to respond. ACI's digital transformation impacted every aspect of business and turned the IT help desk into the epicenter of business operations and strategy. In order to scale business, continue to handle highly sensitive personal information for covered lives, and securely manage a 300 percent annual growth in data collection, I had to find the right technology solutions and act fast. Making Live Cloud Migration a RealityI was specifically looking for a way to consolidate hardware, improve performance, and streamline administration, all while reducing costs: a Herculean task if there ever was one. But with the right partners, the right team, and the right solutions, the impossible was more than just possible--it was one of the proudest moments I can remember of the interoperation of my multidisciplinary team.With months of strategy, coordinating and sandbox experiments, ACI was able to leverage VMware's migration tool, plus a team of only 10 dedicated staff to migrate from multiple colocation centers running private cloud technology to a VMware Cloud on AWS infrastructure. Since ACI runs worldwide with an SLA of 99.999 percent uptime around the clock for millions of concurrent users, we didn't want to bring down our client's systems to make the switchover--it had to happen live. How Cloud Migration Fueled DigitalTransformation and Global Growth for ACI Specialty BenefitsBy Ryan Fay, Global CIO, ACI Specialty BenefitsIN MYOPINION
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