Cloud Storage & Migration for Regulated Industries

The guiding hill

A cloud architect from a regulated industry can easily migrate their on-premises file system data to the cloud, facilitate disaster recovery through high availability and replication, and cut down on high performance storage cost while ensuring complete financial services cloud compliance, without having to train people on how to use it.

Overview

With 20 million banking customers demanding improved services, our mission was to design a cloud migration solution tailored for highly regulated industries. This project focused on securely moving sensitive data to the cloud while ensuring compliance and usability for complex environments like banking and healthcare.

Challenge

The critical challenge was to develop a product from the ground up that could efficiently migrate on-premises data to the cloud. This included ensuring high availability, disaster recovery, and cost-effectiveness in a landscape governed by stringent regulatory requirements. Our guiding principle was to create a solution that enabled cloud architects to perform these tasks seamlessly, without extensive training.

User Research

Recognizing the complexity of our target industries, we embarked on extensive research to understand the stakeholders involved. We conducted over 20 interviews with professionals in banking, healthcare, and government sectors to capture their current processes, workloads, and pain points. This effort led to the development of an extensive library of personas and job roles, helping us understand the unique challenges faced by these users.

Ideation and Collaboration

Through weekly collaboration workshops with a leading European bank, we fostered radical collaboration among cross-functional teams. This iterative process allowed us to share insights and co-create solutions that directly addressed the needs of our client. Our goal was to ensure that our cloud migration product would not only meet the specific demands of the banking sector but also be scalable for all enterprise clients.

Our design team utilized the principles of Enterprise Design Thinking to streamline the cloud migration experience. We focused on:

• Empathy Mapping: Crafting a comprehensive understanding of user roles, responsibilities, and pain points.
• Workflow Visualization: Creating a blueprint of the future organizational structure post-migration, detailing required roles and cross-functional team dynamics.

The result was a streamlined, user-friendly experience that allowed clients to migrate their workloads using familiar technology and UX patterns.

Technical Considerations

Our solution had to accommodate the complexities of managing petabytes of data while ensuring compliance with industry regulations. We prioritized scalability, allowing clients to deploy large volumes of data efficiently, and ensuring that our product could evolve to meet future demands.

Implementation

We adopted a continuous design process, referred to as "the Loop," which emphasizes observing, reflecting, and making. This approach kept us agile, enabling us to learn from both successes and setbacks. As we progressed, we regularly tested our designs with stakeholders, iterating based on their feedback to refine the user experience.

Outcomes

The project successfully bridged the gap between on-premises operations and cloud-based solutions, empowering our clients to work more efficiently. The bank was able to offload physical hardware maintenance, automate workloads, and enhance their operational capacity. Our design not only met the immediate needs of the client but also set a precedent for future organizations migrating to cloud environments.

Reflection

This project reinforced the importance of empathy and collaboration in design. By understanding the intricate workflows and regulatory landscapes of our users, we were able to deliver a solution that significantly improved their operational efficiency. Our approach highlighted the potential of design thinking in driving innovation in even the most complex industries, establishing a model for future cloud migration efforts.

Conclusion

The cloud migration project exemplifies how thoughtful UX design can transform critical processes in regulated industries. By centering our design around user needs and leveraging the principles of Enterprise Design Thinking, we created a product that not only simplifies migration but also enhances the overall experience for both clients and their end-users.