Many journeys to the cloud hit a wall because of culture, not technology. Industry data suggests that up to 70% of cloud adoption friction is non-technical, instead being affected by organisational inertia, siloed teams and the fear of breaking legacy systems.
To break this deadlock, forward-thinking enterprises are moving away from theoretical planning and embracing experience-based acceleration (EBA). Businesses like the Purple Group, the company behind the digital investment platform EasyEquities, partnered with cloud native modernisation acceleration specialist LSD Open and AWS to prove that three days of immersive collaboration can achieve what often takes months of traditional development.
Let’s take a closer look at EBA and the impact on modernisation velocity.
What is an EBA?
An EBA is not a hackathon, and it’s not a training seminar. It is a transformation methodology designed to compress time into developmental focus areas, orchestrated over a three-day workshop. It brings together cross-functional teams like developers, operations, security and business stakeholders into a single room (or virtual space) for an immersive sprint, removing the lag time of ticket queues and e-mails.
The goal of this workshop is simple: learning by doing. Instead of discussing how to migrate a legacy application, the team actually migrates it, live, with experts on standby.
Choosing an accelerator
While the methodology remains consistent, the focus of an EBA workshop changes based on where you are in your cloud journey.
- Migration EBA: Focused on a “lift-and-shift” migration to the cloud. This is for organisations that need to exit a data centre quickly and reliably.
- Modernisation EBA: The focus here is refactoring. This is for teams that are already in the cloud but stuck with legacy monolithic applications and infrastructure. (The ModAx workshop was the chosen format for the Purple Group.)
- Innovation EBA: Focused on creating new value, such as prototyping AI/ML solutions or generative AI features.
- FinOps EBA: For mature cloud businesses, bringing finance and engineering together to optimise resources and cloud spend.
The Purple Group story: unlocking the ‘future engineered’
The Purple Group set a visionary goal for the business to “containerise everything” so that it can scale out internationally. However, like many leaders in the financial services industry, their ambition was often slowed down by complex legacy, NET monoliths and competing business priorities.
To break the deadlock, the Purple Group reached out to LSD Open and AWS for a ModAx EBA, and the results were not just theoretical; they were production ready.
The most significant technical hurdle was a massive legacy repository running on .NET Framework 4, which, under a standard roadmap, would take months to modernise. The team of internal developers and experts from LSD Open utilised application modernisation tools from AWS to achieve the “impossible”. The application was refactored to .NET Core 8, a more modern framework, and successfully migrated from Windows servers to Linux containers for efficiency. This fundamental platform shift was achieved in under 72 hours.
For the operations team, “Patch Tuesday” and Windows updates historically meant after-hours maintenance and lost weekends.
During the EBA, the team standardised their deployments onto Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services), which provides a scalable, Kubernetes-based platform for containerised applications in AWS, making use of cloud-native practices and methodologies to orchestrate scale across the application infrastructure.
Then blue/green deployments were implemented, where two identical production environments ran in parallel, with blue indicating the current state and green indicating the new state. This removed the downtime associated with patching and updates. The Purple Group’s leadership team highlighted that this was not just a technical win, and that it “bought back the weekends” for the ITSM team, improving their work-life balance and more.
As with anything in a technology environment, speed often raises concerns about security, but the EBA model enforces figurative guardrails from hour one.
The security workstream didn’t just have to watch; they were part of the building process, implementing SIEM/SOC integration, enforcing the “principle of least privilege” – granting users, services and apps the minimum required security privileges – and automating conformity checks. This proved that fast deployments can also be compliant deployments.
The human impact
The true value of an EBA is that it can reveal the latent potential within existing teams. It proves that when you remove bureaucratic friction and invite collaboration, your people are capable of extraordinary speed.
Paul Jansen van Vuuren, chief technical officer of the Purple Group, summarised the experience: “The EBA approach has demonstrated just how capable our people are when supported by the right process, the right partners and the right skills. The speed at which they delivered secure, high-impact business value was nothing short of extraordinary. AWS and LSD Open played a critical role across every stage, and we’re eager to build on this success.”
The Purple Group EBA proved that “future engineered” isn’t just a slogan; it is an achievable reality that doesn’t have to take calendar years. By compressing months of decision-making into days of execution, companies can place less focus on planning for the cloud and start implementing their ambitions.