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Seamless migration and cost optimisation for a leading financial services provider on AWS

A leading financial services provider embarked on a strategic initiative to modernise its core customer platform by migrating from on-premises infrastructure to AWS. With rising VMware licensing costs and increasing challenges around scalability and maintenance, the legacy environment was no longer sustainable. The organisation partnered with Cevo to adopt a phased AWS cloud migration strategy to deliver long-term cost savings, improve operational efficiency and modernise the platform.

The move to AWS successfully migrated over 2,000 development applications and 30 supporting apps, improving scalability, reducing overheads, and enhancing infrastructure resilience. This transition also resulted in an estimated annual cost saving of approximately $200,000 AUD by decommissioning legacy infrastructure and eliminating VMware licensing dependencies.

$200,000 AUD

Annual cost savings

Migration

Solution

Financial services

Industry

Business challenge

The customer operates a diverse suite of financial products and services, many of which are powered by its core registry platform. This system underpins several business-critical offerings, supporting advisers, employers, administrators and internal teams across web and mobile channels.

Historically hosted on-premises using VMware, ageing servers and legacy storage, the platform was becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain. Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware led to significant licensing cost increases, while infrastructure constraints limited scalability and growth. These challenges led to the decision to migrate the ecosystem to the cloud to reduce costs, modernise infrastructure and improve scalability.

Solution

The organisation engaged Cevo to assess the benefits of migrating its platform to AWS. A detailed cost-benefit analysis confirmed that a phased AWS migration would deliver financial, operational and technical improvements.

Given the platform’s complexity, including microservices, large-scale databases, messaging queues, file shares and reporting tools, a phased migration strategy was designed to minimise disruption and ensure business continuity.

Key principles guiding the approach included:

  • Leverage AWS cloud-native services where applicable
  • Prioritise a “working-first” solution with iterative improvements
  • Minimise disruption to development and operational teams
  • Deliver in agile, incremental phases
  • Avoid unnecessary spending by targeting high-impact, achievable outcomes
  • Maintain hybrid connectivity between AWS and on-prem infrastructure for segmentation and data continuity
 

Cevo led a detailed discovery and assessment phase, incorporating total cost of ownership modelling and a proof of concept (PoC) to validate the proposed approach. The PoC confirmed key assumptions, including the ability to replicate access controls in AWS, the minimal code changes required for cloud-native MySQL databases, and the effectiveness of existing data security processes.

To reduce risk and maximise value early, Cevo began with migrating all non-production environments to AWS. This involved re-platforming the Kubernetes environment to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), enabling scalable and simplified container management. The team successfully migrated more than 2,000 development applications and over 30 supporting apps across five environments.

Cevo also modernised the data layer, migrating 20TB of MySQL databases to Amazon Aurora and rehosting MongoDB on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to preserve functionality. Additionally, 10TB of SMB and NFS file shares were transitioned to AWS-managed storage using EFS and FSx. Messaging and streaming services, including RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch and Kafka, were also migrated to support more than 200 connections and 3,500 consumers.

The platform was integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Secrets Manager to strengthen observability, security and role-based access.

With the non-production migration complete, the organisation has successfully validated platform performance in a cloud-native environment, reduced operational complexity, and is now well-positioned to migrate staging and production workloads in the coming months.

Outcomes

This initial phase has laid the groundwork for a full production migration in the coming months, however the work has already delivered immediate value. Key benefits include:

  • Cost savings of $200,000 – By decommissioning legacy infrastructure and removing reliance on VMware licensing, the project has achieved estimated annual savings of approximately $200,000 AUD.
  • Smooth migration – Phased approach ensured minimal disruption, with over 2,000 development applications and more than 30 supporting apps successfully migrated to AWS.
  • Messaging at scale – RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch and Kafka now support more than 200 connections and 3,500 consumers.
  • Improved scalability – Amazon EKS has enabled dynamic container scaling, reducing operational complexities.
  • System modernisation – Migration to cloud-native services has improved performance, maintainability and governance.
  • Security and compliance – Integration with IAM, CloudWatch and AWS Secrets Manager has improved observability, access control and readiness for CPS 230 assessments.
  • Improved automation – Infrastructure as Code has enabled repeatable, automated deployments and reduced manual effort.
  • Future-ready – Established a scalable, resilient cloud foundation to support ongoing innovation and business growth.

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