Health Care Organization Goes From COBOL Gridlock to Cloud-Native

Intro

A regional health network relied on COBOL-based systems that had served the organization for decades but could no longer support modern patient experiences or regulatory requirements.

Leadership needed a path to cloud-native services without disrupting critical care operations or ballooning modernization budgets.

The Problem

Legacy applications were tightly coupled, making incremental change slow and risky.

Engineering teams spent most of their capacity maintaining aging infrastructure instead of delivering new digital capabilities.

Compliance and uptime requirements left little room for experimentation or phased migration.

The Solution

ACG designed a strangler-fig migration strategy that prioritized high-value patient-facing services while stabilizing core backend systems:

The engagement delivered:

• ✦Assessment and prioritization of legacy workloads by business impact
• ✦Incremental extraction of services into cloud-native microservices
• ✦Automated testing and observability to de-risk each migration wave
• ✦Platform standards to accelerate delivery after initial migration

The result was a modern cloud foundation that reduced operational drag and created capacity for continuous product delivery.

The Impact

The modernization program delivered measurable outcomes early:

The organization shifted from maintaining legacy gridlock to investing in patient-facing innovation.