A newly divested company saves 20% in IT infrastructure costs and ends TSA early

What We Did

A new financial services company, created as a divestiture from its parent, had to establish the IT infrastructure, applications, and capabilities to run its business—and do so rapidly. Our team was ready, with the right mix of expertise in financial services operations and applications, IT infrastructure, and sourcing. 

We helped the new company:

• Evaluate the potential for a cloud-only infrastructure
• Implement its cloud-only infrastructure strategy, including cloning certain applications from the parent and migrating them to the cloud
• Select and contract with a cloud service provider that provided the best fit for its needs

The Challenge

As executives prepared for the divestiture, they wanted to understand the potential for using a cloud-only, public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) approach rather than establishing a traditional data center. 

The company determined it would not be able to maintain existing applications from the parent company efficiently as the business grows. It needed to take one of two paths forward: clone the existing applications with its own data and then migrate them to the cloud or replace them with software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. 

Also, the client’s IT function employs a low-personnel/high-automation service delivery model. It would need a cloud managed services provider to operate and maintain the new environment. 

An Undeniably Different Approach

That was a challenge perfectly suited for West Monroe. Technology is in our DNA. And when we blend that expertise with deep industry and operational know how—in this case, financial services, cloud, and carve-out experience—the result is sustainable competitive advantage. 

When standing up a new company after divestiture, the clock is ticking. So, our multidisciplinary team got right to work. We analyzed the parent company’s strategy and application portfolio, right-sized the company’s compute and storage capacity to match the future state, and determined that a cloud solution was a better option than a traditional data center.  We identified which applications to replace with a SaaS solution— and how to establish the balance of the applications, along with the company’s data, to the public cloud. 

Then, our sourcing experts stepped in and led the procurement process to identify and establish the external partnerships ideally suited to the company’s specific needs – balancing technical, operational, financial, and contractual considerations.

We understand that creating the right partnership can be critical to sustainable competitive advantage, so our procurement approach was rigorous:

• Evaluating Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure IaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings for operational and technical fit, including managed services
• Mapping projected workloads to AWS and Azure instances and storage types so they could submit apples-to-apples proposals
• Leading pricing, technical, and contractual negotiations 
• Developing detailed financial models for numerous options with both AWS and Azure
• Leading sole-source contractual negotiations with a preferred cloud managed services provider and a cloud migration provider to refactor and migrate applications to the public cloud

Returns You Can Measure

With our assistance, the new company was able to acquire enterprise discounts and credits with its preferred public cloud provider, typically available only to much larger enterprises. As a result, the client was able to reduce its infrastructure costs by 20% relative to the on-premise scenario.