When GEICO sought to migrate its sales mainframe application to the cloud, they had two choices. The first was to “rehost” their applications, which involved recompiling the code to run in a mainframe emulator hosted in a cloud instance. The second choice was to “rebuild” their infrastructure and replace the existing mainframe functionality with equivalent features build using cloud-native capabilities.
The rehost approach is arguably the easier of the two alternatives. Still, it comes with a downside – the inability to leverage native cloud capabilities and benefits like continuous integration and deployment that flow from it.
Even though a rebuild offers the benefits of native cloud capabilities, it is riskier as it adds cost and complexity. GEICO was clear that it not only wanted to move away from the mainframe codebase but also significantly increase the agility through frequent releases. At the same time, risks of the “rebuild” approach involving a million lines of COBOL code and 16 subsystems were staring them in their faces.
This was when GEICO turned to AIS. GEICO hired AIS for a fixed price and time engagement to “rebuild” the existing mainframe application. AIS extracted the business logic from the current system and reimplemented it from ground-up using modern cloud architecture and at the same time, baking in the principles of DevOps and CI/CD from the inception.
Together GEICO and AIS teams achieved the best of both worlds – a risk mitigated “rebuild” approach to mainframe modernization. Check out the full success story on Microsoft, GEICO finds that the cloud is the best policy after seamless modernization and migration.
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