Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1335871
S&P Global Ratings Uses AWS to Speed Application Migration, Drive Innovation 2020 The world's leading provider of independent credit ratings, S&P Global Ratings has helped people across the globe make better financial decisions for more than 150 years. It provides transparency and education by analyzing investment data from sources such as annual reports, news articles, and management interviews, using the findings to generate credit ratings for credit issuers, intermediaries, and investors in 28 countries. Historically, the organization used on-premises data centers to host hundreds of critical financial applications in Oracle RAC databases. However, in order to accelerate business growth in global regions, meet new business opportunities, and develop data science capabilities, S&P Global Ratings needed to move 100 percent to the cloud. "We didn't have any freedom," says Mark Wang, senior director of the Integration Services Group at S&P Global Ratings. "In the on-premises world, it usually took one month to acquire physical servers and another two weeks to install middleware. That was painful for us in terms of our ability to move quickly as a business." Because it needs to comply with Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulatory frameworks for monitoring financial services, the company also sought to improve the stability of its IT environment. "We had an aging data center, with system outages becoming more frequent," Wang says. "For our business, downtime means we face substantial penalties from the SEC." "We have more resilience and stability on AWS, and this will help us avoid SEC penalties due to application downtime…. Being on AWS definitely helps us sleep better at night." Mark Wang, Senior Director, Integration Services Group, S&P Global Ratings Using VMware Cloud on AWS to Streamline a Complex Migration S&P Global Ratings chose to launch its cloud journey on Amazon Web Services (AWS). "We selected AWS because of the ease of use and global presence," says Wang. It needed to move quickly, however, to avoid being penalized by its previous data center provider. "We had to go fast, which was a big challenge because we had a huge on-premises footprint, with aging hardware and data gravity issues with Oracle Exadata databases." The organization solved the problem by using VMware Cloud on AWS, a service that enables companies to seamlessly migrate their on-premises VMware environments to AWS. Using VMware Cloud on AWS, S&P Global Ratings moved half of its applications, including the ones that financial analysts use to create market ratings for customers, in time to meet a migration deadline of eight months and avoid more than $1 million per month in charges from its previous data center provider. "VMware Cloud on AWS gave us the efficiency we needed to accelerate