Our client operates a suburban passenger rail network across major Australian cities, comprising a hybrid urban-suburban system spanning over 813 km of track and 170 stations across eight lines. Confronted with challenges arising from outdated applications and the need to improve operational efficiency and business agility, they initiated efforts to enhance the passenger experience, optimize asset utilization and bolster network resilience.
The Challenge
In the dynamic landscape of passenger transportation, organizations grapple with various challenges that affect operational efficiency and business agility. For our client, these included:
- Their aging application portfolio impacts operational efficiency and business agility, hindering the transformation of the passenger experience
- Needed to improve asset utilization, enhance network resilience and address capacity issues to minimize network outages
- Management of multiple application vendors and associated overheads
- Requirement to deliver services in line with service levels, utilizing standard processes and technologies
- Lack of agility to meet business demands and lengthy lead times for resource scaling based on demand
The Objective
Addressing the above challenges was pivotal for the organization to thrive in the dynamic passenger transportation sector. They sought to enhance the passenger experience, optimize asset utilization and bolster network resilience.
The Solution
Our holistic cloud migration and management approach facilitated enhanced scalability, agility and cost-effectiveness in the modern digital landscape. Our solution achieved the following deliverables:
- Established foundational services, security and governance
- Hosted NextGen Firewall and DMZ (internet-facing) workloads, apps and data tier-related workloads
- Centralized S3 bucket for storing AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config log files from all accounts
- Enabled identification and resolution of vulnerabilities early through "shift-left" testing
- Continuous scanning of vulnerabilities by integrating security scanning in the DevOps continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline
- Enabled developers to own and develop infra and app together and treat it as a single entity
- Established migration methodology using the 4R framework
- Rebuilt only strategic revenue-generating, tightly coupled two/three-tier monolith applications
- 20+ applications migrated to the cloud, including public websites, .NET websites, CMS and TIBCO
- Migrated fault-prone on-premises data center to resilient cloud PaaS environment
- Three-phase approach focused on the deployment architecture and infrastructure aspects of migration
- Defined cloud path for TIBCO software
- Provided deployment and automation considerations for installing and configuring TIBCO products infra
- Migration path for all TIBCO services/patterns, NFR testing performance and failover
The Impact
The organization embarked on a path toward modernization and innovation by deploying a secure and scalable cloud solution anchored on security-first design principles.
- Implemented automated provisioning of infrastructure and software components using infrastructure-as-code frameworks
- Achieved a 25-30% reduction in the total cost of ownership through cloud migration of applications
- Enhanced driver and staff satisfaction and retention by implementing a transparent rostering and award system
- Maximized asset utilization to optimize operational efficiency
