Driving a cloud transformation for security and sustainability

carsales also actively looks for ways to run its operation more efficiently and reduce its environmental impact. By operating entirely within the cloud for all systems, carsales no longer needs to manage and maintain its own data centers for product and technology solutions. Distributed systems ensure that services can be continuously provided to its customers.

In 2022, 95% of carsales workloads were on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, but the remaining 5% were running off a data center. carsales had compelling reasons to complete a migration and modernization effort:

• The data center was costing the company a significant sum, and the lease was coming up for renewal.
• Running in a multi-tenant environment relied on deprecated VPN networking capabilities.
• The legacy data center workloads presented security and resiliency risks.
• The newer AWS Graviton instances deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads and use up to 60% less energy, thus reducing carbon footprint.

The results that carsales achieved proved that this initiative was worth the effort.

To begin, exiting the previous data center (DC) reduced costs and shifted them from capital expenditure to operational expenditure, improving cash flow management and freeing capital for other investments.

Second, the migration made it possible to uplift the networking topology across carsales, moving away from traditional VPNs that present a larger attack surface and higher risk of data breaches.

With all workloads in the cloud, carsales was able to transition to modern zerotrust networking with a secure access service edge (SASE) provider, Zscaler. In addition to being more secure and scalable, the zero-trust network is easier for carsales employees to use and maintain, with lower operating costs.

Third, modernizing its networking and applications positioned carsales well for its annual audit. Zero-trust reduces the scope of compliance, streamlines the audit process, improves detection and response, and facilitates detailed access control and monitoring. As a result, carsales can navigate the audit more smoothly and with greater confidence.

Finally, the move to Graviton processors optimized costs by 5x. Graviton is a new technology that supports multi-architecture and provides better, faster performance that is 40% more sustainable.

Slalom joined with subject matter experts (SMEs) at carsales and led the migration and modernization project to great success.

The Technology Enablement team from Slalom assessed and consolidated the number of servers that needed to be migrated to the cloud. Of the original servers, about half were needed, which sped up the migration process.

Some of the migration was accomplished using application migration services from AWS. However, some systems required export/import tools. “We moved systems for carsales that I’ve never moved before, and that presented quite a challenge. But with the help of the SMEs who knew things from end to end, we were able to resolve it,” said Mohammed Usman, principal for Technology Enablement at Slalom.

To get started with the modernization efforts, the team chose a pilot app that determines ad hierarchy when private sellers advertise their inventory. The process of modernizing that pilot app resulted in learnings about the pitfalls and the way forward as the modernization initiative expands across the organization.

Slalom also applied a wider lens, evaluating similar modernization efforts across more business units, which generated a consolidated ROI report for carsales to assess feasibility and support long-term planning. These modernization efforts are focused on driving critical business value, including optimizing costs, using the latest technology, and generating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impacts.

With the completion of this migration and modernization project, carsales met its goal to be “DC-free by 2023” and has seen significant uplift around networking, security, scalability, and operating cost of its systems. These results were highlighted in its 2023 sustainability report.