Northern Trust
The organization
A global financial institution providing asset servicing, investment management, and wealth management. This work took place in a highly regulated environment and is described here within careful confidentiality boundaries.
The challenge
Move more than 500 physical servers and their data out of U.S. data centres and into AWS, in phases, without weakening the backup, recovery, or availability guarantees a regulated bank is obligated to maintain.
What I delivered
The core programme: a phased migration of more than 500 physical servers and associated structured and unstructured data workloads from U.S. data centres to AWS.
- Standardized server and data specifications across a large, heterogeneous estate.
- Coordinated infrastructure, application, business, and executive stakeholders through each phase.
- Supported both structured and unstructured data workloads under bank governance and security standards.
- Working with application teams to find and clear what would break at cutover: outdated database fields, insecure account structures, and legacy integrations.
- Assigning every asset to a migration wave against cloud-readiness criteria, so a problem in any single wave affected one group of systems rather than the whole estate.
- Leading remediation of backup and data gaps found during readiness work, and reprioritizing high-risk migration phases as a result.
- Keeping the migrating estate aligned with the institution's disaster-recovery and high-availability policies throughout the programme rather than reconciling afterwards.