SonicWall, a cybersecurity company with over three decades of experience, faced mounting challenges managing its expanding portfolio of applications across a legacy on-premises infrastructure. The company’s initial lift-and-shift migration to AWS helped move workloads to the cloud but replicated inefficiencies from its previous setup. Without a unified management interface, developers and operations teams encountered collaboration hurdles, unpredictable costs, and limited visibility.
To address these issues and support future growth, SonicWall partnered with SoftServe and AWS to build a centralized shared services platform. This initiative aimed to simplify infrastructure management, improve developer productivity, and accelerate modernization timelines. Ultimately, the project:
- Reduced service onboarding time by 70%
- Accelerated application modernization timelines by six months
- Delivered a minimum viable product (MVP) in just four weeks
Challenges
SonicWall’s legacy infrastructure created silos that hindered agility. Applications migrated to AWS lacked standardized APIs and portals, resulting in fragmented environments that slowed deployment and increased operational overhead. Developers struggled with fragmented environments, while operations teams faced rising costs and limited system insights.
The absence of a unified platform slowed innovation and complicated onboarding for new services. As SonicWall expanded through acquisitions, the absence of a unified platform delayed integration efforts and increased IT complexity. The company required a foundation that could support rapid deployment, streamline operations, and enable seamless integration across environments.
Solution
SoftServe introduced its Application Modernization Platform (SAMP), a modular framework designed to support platform engineering initiatives. With funding from the AWS Modernization Acceleration Program (MAP), SonicWall and SoftServe launched a pilot to validate the shared services platform concept.
The architecture leveraged AWS services, including:
- Amazon EKS for container orchestration
- Amazon S3 for scalable storage
- AWS Lambda for serverless computing
- Amazon Aurora for database management
- Amazon OpenSearch Service for observability
SoftServe’s infrastructure-as-code approach and tailored implementation enabled SonicWall to build a flexible, scalable platform. The pilot phase validated the shared services concept and addressed key modernization requirements, enabling SonicWall to move from concept to MVP in just four weeks. The architecture incorporated AWS best practices and services to ensure scalability and observability, including Amazon EKS, S3, Lambda, Aurora, and OpenSearch.
Value Delivered
The shared services platform reduced service onboarding time by 70%, allowing developers to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure. Standardized operations and real-time monitoring tools provided actionable insights that improved decision-making and reduced infrastructure costs.
The platform also laid the groundwork for future migrations and integrations. When SonicWall acquired three companies, the new infrastructure simplified IT standardization and accelerated environment integration.
Denis Branco, EVP of Cloud Engineering and Operations at SonicWall, noted,
Let’s talk about how SoftServe implements solutions to modernize your applications and tailors them to your specific business needs.