Wednesday, August 21, 2013

From 12 Weeks to 39 Minutes: An Insurer Speeds IT Updates — and Strengthens its Business

Financial services companies routinely maintain hundreds of core applications and systems for everything from billing and claims to fraud detection. Upgrades can easily become overwhelming.

When a leading investment and insurance company found its application updates required a lengthy 12 weeks, slowing its ability to roll out new products, it looked to a software as a service solution. The insurer leveraged our Cloud360™ BusinessCloud solution to quickly shift its development and test environments to a public cloud. The shift automated the company’s project synchronization and brought new life to its development efforts. The time now required to update cloud-based applications? Thirty-nine minutes. 

The new environment, launched in the first quarter of 2013, is the insurer’s first foray into cloud-based technology. In addition to the speedy system updates, the insurer also gained consistency across all of its environments and greater insight into its operations, with the ability to track each business unit’s resource consumption.

After a week of planning and identifying the requirements, the team completed implementation in four weeks. Validation took four more weeks. Our team created a hybrid architecture that integrated the existing system’s components and migrated development, user acceptance testing, regression and performance testing to Amazon Web Services. 

Our Cloud360 solution monitors consumption across the environments and recommends optimized usage. By reducing the provisioning timelines from months to minutes and implementing usage metrics, the investment and insurance company gained a more adaptive and elastic business environment. It also enabled scalability, reduced costs and increased operational efficiencies, such as speeding batch application performance by 40%.

Today, the company builds more applications faster, and without the delays of unwieldy logistics and overly complex project management.

Friday, August 2, 2013

Cloud360 goes mobile. Manage your cloud environments…on the go

The Future of Work is all about going beyond the boundaries of space and time enforced on us by the older technologies.  It is about attuning ourselves to the workplace that is virtual, mobile, and constraint-free. Rapid advances in technology, ever-changing customer demands, and increasing competitive pressures are forcing enterprises to not only reformulate their strategies but also the technology base behind those strategies. To cater to this need of the time, Cognizant’s Cloud360 Mobile App is now available on iTunes. This is part of Cognizant's overall cloud strategy that revolves around helping clients to drive business agility by leveraging anything-as-a-service models available through the use of cloud technologies. 


As enterprises are increasingly adopting cloud computing, they are facing a lot of challenges in terms of management complexity and costs. Cognizant’s Cloud360 helps enterprises transform their traditional IT environment life cycles and gain greater control over their environment. Cloud360 is a Cloud management platform that abstracts, governs, and delivers the best service, and on-demand experience to enterprises. Cloud360 provides enterprises with provisioning, monitoring, automation and analytics capabilities to transform their current IT environments to cloud environment. It helps enterprises integrate with the existing infrastructure and manage applications across diverse clouds platforms.

Cloud360 ability to manage multiple Cloud platforms provides the flexibility to the enterprise to leverage multiple Cloud Platforms eliminating vendor lock-in. The rich self-service portal of Cloud360 enables the business users to provision applications on the cloud environment via the one-click provisioning feature using the standardized catalogs and workflows. Cloud360 Mobile provides an interface to manage all your applications on the go using your iPhone or iPod Touch. 

With the Cloud360 Mobile App you can:
  • View applications that are deployed in your cloud
  • Deploy new applications with a single click using application profiles
  • Start, stop, or de-provision your applications
  • Switch seamlessly across clouds if you have access to multiple clouds