A banking group ran its retail banking business on two aging, lease-expiring on-prem data centers hosting 450+ applications across six business lines. Blue Avanti architected and led a cloud-first data-center exit and consolidation program — a three-year roadmap to migrate to the cloud, cut cost and carbon, and modernize the estate before the leases ended.
Continuing on-prem meant re-leasing and re-investing in infrastructure the business was outgrowing. Three pressures made that untenable.
Two US data centers with leases terminating Q4 2026, running end-of-life hardware, operating systems, and middleware. Staying put meant a costly re-lease and re-investment in a footprint sized for the past, not the future.
450+ applications across six business lines — distributed, mainframe, IBM i, and Domino — with poorly understood dependencies. There was no consolidated view of what could move, in what order, or at what risk.
The business needed to cut IT cost, reduce data-center carbon, and respond faster to new demand — while staying fully aligned with internal governance and regulatory requirements. Ad-hoc, project-by-project migration couldn't deliver that at scale.
Not a lift-and-shift scramble — a governed, factory-model migration built on discovery, standardized patterns, and joint governance across the bank, delivery partner, and hyperscalers.
Automated application and infrastructure discovery (Portfolio Planning) mapped the as-is estate and its dependencies, then defined the target state, consolidation waves, and a prioritized three-year roadmap aligned to each business unit's plan.
A validated cloud landing zone, security architecture, and CI/CD framework, delivered through a repeatable migration factory — so applications moved on standardized patterns rather than one-off projects, across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
A multi-party governance model (bank, delivery partner, and cloud providers) with a benefit-realization plan tied to business KPIs — plus a target operating model and change management to upskill staff for cloud, Agile, and DevOps.
A data-center lease deadline reframed as a three-year cloud strategy — with cost, carbon, and modernization targets tied to each business unit's plan. Figures below reflect program targets.
End-of-life on-prem replaced with standardized cloud patterns, sized to the business's growth rather than a fixed data-center footprint.
A joint governance model and benefit-realization plan kept every wave aligned with business KPIs, internal controls, and regulatory requirements.
A prioritized roadmap and migration factory positioned the bank to accelerate migration year over year through 2026.
We turned a data-center lease deadline into a three-year cloud strategy — a prioritized roadmap, a repeatable migration factory, and a governance model our regulators and our business could stand behind.
Blue Avanti architects and leads governed, factory-model cloud migrations that cut cost and carbon while staying defensible to regulators. Start with a free discovery call.