Driving Efficiency: Investment Firm Delivers Faster Apps at Lower Costs with .NET Core & Azure Cloud

Legacy stack limitations: COBOL + .NET Framework apps were hard to maintain, costly, and lacked scalability.

Infrastructure overheads: 80+ on-prem servers were consuming high operational costs and demanded frequent patching and upgrades.

Integration gaps: Legacy applications had limited APIs, making it difficult to integrate with modern web/mobile channels.

Business risk: Performance bottlenecks during peak hours, delayed releases, and dependency on a shrinking COBOL skill pool.

Client's need: A cloud-ready, future-proof solution with faster release cycles, reduced cost of ownership, and improved user experience.

Assessed 15+ applications across COBOL and .NET Framework

Categorized workloads into Re-platform (lift-and-shift), Re-factor, and Re-build streams

Prioritized high-impact applications for .NET Core 8 migration and Azure deployment

Re-engineered COBOL modules into microservices with .NET Core, using REST APIs and gRPC for communication

Migrated on-prem SQL Server databases (50M+ records) to Azure SQL Database with Data Migration Assistant and Azure Database Migration Service

Adopted Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for containerized workloads to support scale-out patterns

Set up Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines with automated builds, tests, and deployments

Implemented Application Insights, Log Analytics, and Azure Monitor for proactive monitoring

Applied Azure Security Center and RBAC to strengthen compliance and governance

Developed a custom interoperability layer to support phased COBOL to .NET Core migration, ensuring zero downtime

Introduced feature toggles to roll out new modules incrementally without disrupting end users