Case study
Multi-layered Cloud Center of Excellence helps global telco accelerate development cycles by 40%
OUR CLIENT
As a leading provider of cellular services, this multinational telecommunications company serves approximately 175 million customers in the U.S. The company generates over $50 billion in annual revenue and employs at least 100,000 people.
THE CHALLENGE
Complex cloud footprint caused cost, development, and security challenges across the enterprise
As a global company that relies on cloud computing to effectively provide cellular services to customers and efficiently run its business, our client had many ongoing cloud initiatives using different “hyperscale” service providers. This situation created complexity, leading to increasing cloud costs, critical architectural decisions made on the fly, a backlog of projects, developer tools, documentation, and resources scattered across the organization, and mounting security issues. Since the situation had begun to impact the roll-out of new features and functionality negatively, the CIO was under pressure to resolve the issue before it became unmanageable.
THE TRANSFORMATION
A Cloud Center of Excellence leveraged best-practice standards and self-service capabilities
UST recommended that a centralized Cloud Center of Excellence become the authority for cloud infrastructure,application standards and governance across the global organization. UST suggested creating reusable, self-service workflows and tools to facilitate and accelerate cloud development initiatives rather than constantly adding staff and rules. The project team proposed the Center of Excellence follow a paradigm focused on these critical layers:
- A cloud infrastructure layer - based on a scalable Kubernetes container platform
- A cloud and application security layer - to manage standards and enforce compliance
- A continuous software delivery development approach - using a flexible, serverless development platform
- An API gateway - to provide visibility and apply security and policy standards for API usage across the organization
THE IMPACT
Developers gained peace of mind that all resources comply with cloud management standards
The global communications company can now follow a structured methodology to manage and prioritize cloud development initiatives while keeping costs and human resources in check. Since the Cloud Center of Excellence was created, the company has achieved these results:
- 70% reduction in application project backlog
- 50% decrease in development costs per function point
- 40% acceleration in application release cycles