Securing Legacy Systems: A Cloud Transformation Journey for Centralized Governance and Resilience

A multinational enterprise in the transportation and logistics sector, with a strong focus on container shipping. With a global footprint and an annual revenue of approximately USD 30 billion, the organization operates at scale, serving customers worldwide through an extensive network of shipping routes and logistics solutions.

The client, a global leader in shipping and logistics, sought to modernize its software delivery processes to support growing business demands and accelerate digital transformation. The organization faced significant challenges in achieving end-to-end automation across its release management lifecycle, particularly when integrating with complex legacy systems. These challenges included inconsistent deployment practices, manual interventions during production releases, security compliance gaps, and limited scalability of existing workflows.

To address these issues and build a streamlined, reliable release process, the organization engaged 1CloudHub to implement a robust automation solution. The goal was to design and deploy a modern CI/CD pipeline that would enable zero-touch deployments, enhance release consistency across environments, integrate automated security controls, and create a scalable foundation for future innovation.

Manual Deployment Processes:Release management involved significant manual effort, especially during production deployments. These manual steps introduced inconsistencies, increased operational risk, and made it difficult to enforce security best practices uniformly.

Legacy System Constraints: Core components of the application were tied to legacy systems that lacked compatibility with modern CI/CD tooling. This limited the ability to automate deployments and apply standardized security validations across all systems.

Security Gaps in the Pipeline: The absence of integrated security scans during early pipeline stages left critical vulnerabilities undetected until later phases, increasing remediation time and risk exposure.

Lack of Centralized Governance and Security Controls: The absence of centralized identity and access management (IAM) made it extremely difficult to enforce consistent user access policies. Each system managed credentials independently, with no federation, leading to a fragmented access model and severe risks of unauthorized access. There was no unified logging or observability across systems.

1Cloudhub has implemented a modernized solution featuring a secure, scalable, and highly available cloud-native architecture built entirely on AWS. It integrates microservices, zero-trust security principles, infrastructure as code (IaC), and centralized governance to support enterprise-grade digital workloads while enabling rapid innovation and operational efficiency.

Secure, Cloud-Native Architecture: The solution leverages AWS-native services like Amazon EKS (Fargate), RDS, CloudFront, and API Gateway to deliver a scalable, highly available, and resilient microservices-based architecture. Multi-AZ deployments, automated failover, and encrypted storage ensure performance and continuity.

Unified Identity, Access & Security Monitoring: Federated authentication via PingFederate and IAM Identity Center (integrated with Azure AD) enables role-based, time-bound access aligned with Zero Trust. Service Control Policies (SCPs) enforce governance across accounts, while AWS Config, GuardDuty, Security Hub, and CloudTrail provide continuous compliance monitoring, centralized threat detection, and security event auditing.

Automated CI/CD & DevSecOps: The pipeline integrates GitLab with Jenkins and SonarQube for secure, automated deployments. Security gates and IaC with Terraform ensure consistency, rapid delivery, and compliance from development through production.

Infrastructure Automation & Disaster Recovery: All infrastructure is defined and deployed through Terraform and CloudFormation, ensuring version-controlled, repeatable environments. Cross-Region Replication, S3, and multi-AZ setups enable robust disaster recovery and business continuity.

✅ AWS IAM Identity Center
✅ AWS Organizations
✅ AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
✅ Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
✅ Amazon Route 53
✅ Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
✅ Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
✅ AWS Secret Manager
✅ Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) – Application Load Balancer
✅ AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)
✅ Amazon GuardDuty
✅ Amazon Inspector
✅ AWS Security Hub
✅ AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)
✅ Amazon API Gateway
✅ AWS Backup

Operational Efficiency: By implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform and CloudFormation, and integrating CI/CD pipelines with GitLab, Jenkins, and SonarQube, the solution automates environment provisioning and secure deployments. Tasks that previously took hours for manual setup and deployment are now executed in minutes, improving engineering throughput by over 70%. This results in faster go-to-market, reduced operational overhead, and consistent infrastructure across development, QA, and production environments.

Enhanced Security and Governance: With centralized access control using AWS IAM Identity Center and Service Control Policies (SCPs), the organization eliminated the risks tied to long-lived credentials and inconsistent permissions. Time-bound, role-based access via federated SSO (PingFederate + AD) reduces insider threats and enforces least-privilege access across accounts. Additionally, continuous threat detection through AWS GuardDuty and Security Hub has increased security visibility by 100%, helping proactively block or mitigate threats before they impact operations.

Continuous Compliance and Audit Readiness: Using AWS Config, CloudTrail, and centralized logging in a dedicated security account, the organization ensures full visibility into resource configurations and API activities. Previously manual audits that required weeks to compile now take hours, reducing compliance reporting time by up to 80%. Custom and managed Config Rules enforce encryption, tagging, and non-public resource usage, ensuring continuous alignment with industry standards.

High Availability and Resilience: By leveraging multi-AZ deployments for Amazon RDS and Amazon EKS, with S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) for disaster recovery, the solution ensures system continuity even in the event of a zone or regional failure. This design has reduced planned and unplanned downtime to near zero, meeting stringent RTO/RPO targets and achieving service availability. Automated failover and scalable load balancing further protect against service disruption.

Cost Optimization and Scalability: Migrating to AWS-native services like EKS Fargate and implementing serverless architecture has eliminated the need for overprovisioned compute instances. This transition, along with automation of security and compliance monitoring, has resulted in an annual cost saving while supporting seamless scale-out to accommodate growing workloads. The modular, decoupled design supports future expansion without re-architecting.

✅ Reduced manual effort, leading to faster document processing.

✅ Streamlined processes, resulting in increased productivity.

✅ Timely identification of document disparities for quicker resolutions.

✅ Enhanced responsiveness to customer inquiries and market changes.

✅ Minimized errors in document processing, reducing compliance risks and supporting accurate decision-making.