| | September 20209CIOReviewsecurity, 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 switch over--it had to happen live. My team used vMotion to create a series of scripts that we first tested on smaller clients before migrating larger clients. Even though it took about 13 hours to migrate each client due to the size of data stores, the team was successfully able to migrate the entire workload from one environment to another before moving it to VMware's cloud. This cloud migration enabled ACI to quickly onboard acquired c om pani es' systems and data, provide end users with a 24/7/365 on-demand benefits experience, uphold an SLA of 99.999 percent uptime, and meet strict compliance requirements in diverse geographies. ACI subsequently secured its largest partnership to date, doubled ACI's infrastructure, achieved measurable cost savings and strong results:· Reduced ACI's data center TCO by 60 percent, improved ability to secure mission-critical applications by 50 percent, and ACI's developers are 20-30 percent more efficient in developing business applications to support sales· Allowed ACI to meet and exceed guaranteed SLAs while providing 99.999 percent uptime, a 35 percent improvement in performance and stronger compliance processes· Enabled ACI to deliver a mobile-first employee assistance program that offers on-demand access to mental health benefits--an industry first· Helped ACI resolve problems 40 percent faster, and provide clients with up-to-date, easily consumable information about capacity and performance· Freed up over 40 percent of ACI's technical resources to focus on innovation instead of routine tasks.Tackling the Next Big Industry ChangesIT is no longer in the era of "What can we do?" Possibilities are limitless. Change is constant. Instead, IT leaders have to ask and answer the tougher questions, "Why should we do it?" and "How does this drive business revenue?" Every organization, across every industry, has to assess what technology they need to grow, evolve, and remain competitive. IT leaders have to make sure the technology they invest in produces ROI and improves organizational performance. As a business leader and technologist, I know it is tempting to drive technology for the sake of technology, but remember business drives technology and technology powers the business.
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