Accelerating Application Portfolio Transformation to the Cloud

The digital economy rewards “speed” in delivering new software to engage and meet the needs of customers. Organizations need to leverage new software-delivery processes powered by the cloud to ensure they meet the dynamic needs of the business. This will require them to transform and modernize their application portfolio across the people, process, technology and cultural fronts.

To transform and deliver speed at scale, organizations need to target three levers. First, they must gain a deeper understanding of the portfolio, identify dependencies, costs, and risks of moving to a cloud to build the business case. Second, they must transform the culture to accelerate “speed” by leveraging build-measure-learn methodology pioneered by Eric Ries.¹

 and deliver the basic application quickly (i.e., minimum viable product, or MVP), iterating swiftly and validating along the way. Third, they must acquire the right application development talent (in-house and in-sourced) comprised of software architects, user advocates, and even field researchers to understand user needs.

Cognizant Digital Engineering, in partnership with AWS, helps organizations in their transformation and digital readiness journey by discovering unmet customer needs, developing new applications, refactoring legacy applications, and moving them to the AWS cloud. We also help to build the business case and plan to move the portfolio to the AWS cloud. We do this by providing:

1. Technology, Tools & Accelerators: Accelerate their journey by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and automation to compress development time and reduce waste. Automation can accelerate a 10–12-week project to a few days. Our AI engine evaluates application code to identify changes needed for cloud deployment. It scans for antipatterns and recommends remediation. It can implement the recommendations with a click. AWS’s cloud-native development and serverless tools ensure speed and future readiness.

2. Enablement of Processes: The key goal here is to create a product engineering mindset and culture, from strategy to execution. We work side by side to enable assimilation of: Pair programming, CI/CD, test-driven development, build-measure-learn with MVPs, and elimination of waste — including time and work cycles. The joint team releases MVPs rapidly, iterates quickly, and validates along the way.

3. Availability of Expertise: Our pool of 53,000 engineers and developers work side by side with organizations either on-premises or from one of our North American Cognizant Studios locations, augmented by offshore resources when appropriate. The objective is to do the right work in the right place at the right cost.

The Cognizant and AWS partnership is helping organizations modernize and transform their application portfolios to meet the dynamic needs of the digital economy by leveraging highly experienced talent with proven tools and techniques.

A large North American Bank partnered with us to modernize their digital global payments network with a reimagined partner experience. The initiative helped the client to improve competitiveness and retain market leadership by enabling new products, standards and security measures faster than the competition. The client also benefited from real-time payment readiness, low-latency payment transactions (300-ms response for payment transactions) and Six Nine availability (

To learn more about Accelerate Application Transformation for the Cloud, click here or write to AWSome@Cognizant.com.

¹The Lean Startup Methodology, Eric Ries