Customer Stories / Financial Services

2024
Dansk Bank logo

Danske Bank Halves Large-Scale Migration Timeline with Hyperautomation on AWS

Danske Bank collaborates with AWS to streamline the migration of 16,600 servers to the cloud, minimizing costs and human-error risks with hyperautomation.

50%

faster migration timeline

50%

reduced in dual run costs

50%

reduced migration program costs

4 seconds

to create application runbooks

700+

employees trained on cloud best practices

Overview

Danske Bank (Danske), a Danish financial services corporation with over 20,000 employees and customers in eight countries, launched a five-year plan to become a leading digital bank. To reduce costs and drive faster innovation, the company planned to migrate more than 16,600 servers, 60,000 containers, along with 25 petabytes of data spread across more than 1,000 workloads to the cloud.

Danske worked with AWS Professional Services and other specialized AWS teams to develop a detailed migration runbook and identify tasks suitable for automation, streamlining the migration process, reducing risks, and achieving their business objectives. By adopting a hyperautomation approach in collaboration with AWS Professional Services and expanding the bank’s cloud expertise through AWS Training and Certification programs, Danske halved migration timelines and dual run costs and laid the groundwork for continuous innovation.  

Danske Bank branch office sign  photo

Opportunity | Accelerating Cloud Migration to Transform IT Landscape

Danske Bank (Danske) is a Danish multinational financial services corporation with more than 3 million customers. In a bid to become a leading bank in the digital age, Danske announced its Forward ’28 strategy in 2023 with the focus on enhancing customer offerings, investments in digital platforms, expert advisory services, and sustainability initiatives.  As part of the strategy, the institution collaborates with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to transform its IT landscape, adopting cloud technologies and generative AI to personalize customer experiences and boost internal productivity.

Migrating to AWS from a hybrid on-premises and private cloud environment was a major undertaking for Danske. The bank had over 16,600 servers and 60,000 containers, along with 25 petabytes of data spread across more than 1,000 workloads, including VMware-based systems that were set to be rehosted on the public cloud.

Ashish Shekhar, senior vice president, global head of technology platforms at Danske Bank, says, “For organizations of our size, cloud migration typically takes five to eight years. We wanted to move much faster, so we collaborated with AWS experts to develop a highly automated, data-driven approach to cloud migration.” The bank set an ambitious goal to rehost 15 workloads and 200 servers per week with minimal impact to applications teams.

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“Implementing the hyperautomation solution at Danske Bank has been a game-changer, yielding significant savings in time and costs. These freed-up resources are now powering value-driven initiatives that directly benefit our customers. ”

Ashish Shekhar
Senior Vice President, Global Head of Technology Platforms at Danske Bank

Solution | Collaborating with AWS Professional Services to Identify Migration Automation Opportunities

To achieve its migration targets and simultaneously minimize risks, Danske worked with AWS Professional Services to develop an end-to-end migration framework. The framework is built by automating the migration execution using Cloud Migration Factory on AWS, serverless technology including AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions to execute automations, and Amazon DynamoDB as a fully managed NoSQL database to capture the state of each automation step.

One challenge Danske faced was ensuring a consistent, repeatable process for migrating diverse applications to AWS. With multiple teams involved, cross-team alignment on a standardized migration runbook was critical. To this end, AWS Professional Services collaborated with Danske stakeholders to organize a Migration Automation Workshop.

During the workshop, participants visualized and documented a step-by-step process for migrating applications to AWS. Roles and responsibilities were clearly defined, and different teams identified opportunities for automation. AWS Professional Services then built an end-to-end migration engine, automating 90% of migration activities. This included integrating a platform from AWS Partner Cutover, which orchestrated the end-to-end tasks necessary for the migration. This streamlined and automated approach ensured consistency, reduced manual errors, and accelerated the migration process, with Cutover.com as a single pane of glass for the migration orchestration, guiding the teams through each step seamlessly.

To ensure its teams could effectively participate in the migration process and operate efficiently in the cloud, Danske leveraged AWS Training and Certification to upskill its employees, prioritizing migration teams. So far, 700 employees have been trained on AWS, with plans to train 4000 more staff by 2027. After interviewing 35 Danske teams and leads, AWS developed role-specific learning paths for each role. Importantly, cloud training was embedded into management courses to drive organization-wide cloud adoption.

A total of nine instructor-led trainings were held across four courses: Architecting, Developing, Cloud Operations, and Security Engineering. In addition, digital courses are being delivered through AWS Skill Builder Team subscription, which facilitates cloud skill development with administrative features, reporting, and access to hands-on and game-based learning. This allows Danske’s employees to acquire AWS skills on-demand, aligning with the competencies required for driving cloud-based projects.
 

Outcome | Accelerating Migration by 50% with AWS Expertise and Automation

By adopting a hyperautomated approach to migration and leveraging AWS experts along with cloud best practices, Danske accelerated the migration of VMware-based workloads, improving productivity, reducing costs, and minimizing risks. Creation of a custom runbook and automated tooling decreased the projected migration timeline by 50 percent.

By analyzing common migration tasks, AWS experts tailored the automation to fit the bank’s specific needs, customizing the orchestration and adjusting the automation templates to ensure optimal results for its unique requirements. While it used to take the bank three to four weeks to create a runbook for each application, it now takes just 4 seconds. “Implementing the hyperautomation solution at Danske Bank has been a game-changer, yielding significant savings in time and costs. These freed-up resources are now powering value-driven initiatives that directly benefit our customers,” Shekhar says.

Since the mass migration program and associated trainings began in February 2024, Danske has tripled its speed of migration compared to the previous two years. “We successfully accelerated our cloud adoption journey on AWS while maintaining a high level of control and visibility throughout the entire migration process,” Shekhar says.

Furthermore, with streamlined workflows, dual run and migration program costs have decreased by 50 percent. Shorter migrations mean Danske spends less time paying for both on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Meanwhile, automation has eliminated the human-error risk typically associated with large-scale migrations executed manually by internal teams. Plus, the automation artifacts developed can be reused for subsequent optimization and modernization efforts.

“By collaborating with AWS experts, we launched a solution called Danske Bank Lyn™, powered by hyperautomation. This allows us to focus our time and energy on preparing our people to embrace the new world we're entering,” Shekhar concludes. “Danske’s transformation story is about embracing change and innovation while overcoming numerous hurdles, ultimately driven by excellent collaboration.”

About Danske Bank

Danske Bank is a Danish multinational bank and financial services company with over 3 million customers in eight countries. The enterprise recently announced its Forward ’28 strategy, embracing cloud technologies such as generative AI to become a leading digital bank. Danske’s customers are served across three business units: personal, business, and large corporate/institutions.

AWS Services Used

AWS Professional Services

The AWS Professional Services organization is a global team of experts that can help you realize your desired business outcomes when using the AWS Cloud.

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AWS Training and Certification

Learn from AWS experts. Advance your skills and knowledge. Build your future in the AWS Cloud.

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AWS Skill Builder Team Subscription

The AWS Skill Builder Team subscription grants unlimited access to expert-led AWS Digital Training, self-paced labs, learning plans, practice exams, and more. Team challenges and role-playing games make learning fun, and administrative features enable you to assign goals and track progress.

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