Business Context
Hayes Software Systems needed to reduce infrastructure costs, improve disaster recovery, support customer growth, enable product roadmap expansion, and improve scalability and operational reliability.
Starting State
The platform began in a co-location data center with three IIS web servers and one SQL Server. Releases, deployments, and customer onboarding were largely manual.
My Role
I served as technical project lead for AWS migration strategy, infrastructure design, provisioning, security, IAM, monitoring, backups, Route 53, EC2, S3, deployment engineering, and operational improvements.
Strategic Insight
The organization completed a cloud migration, but had not yet completed a cloud transformation. Cloud adoption exposed weaknesses in operating models, deployment processes, automation, governance, and standardization.
Actions Taken
- Built reusable PowerShell automation modules.
- Standardized deployment patterns.
- Created environment templates.
- Implemented CI/CD pipelines.
- Automated deployment validation.
- Improved release management.
- Automated customer onboarding workflows.
Business Outcomes
The release process moved from multiple hours with hundreds of manual validations to less than one hour with automated validation. Customer onboarding became automated, reducing manual effort, operational risk, and configuration drift while improving reliability and consistency.
What started as a cloud migration ultimately became a cloud transformation. As the environment scaled from four servers to over four hundred, the operating model had to evolve with it.