National Bank of Canada Structures a Cloud Transformation Program

NBC’s roadmap to exit its on-premises environment was clear and structured, but it reached a critical juncture in its IT infrastructure that required immediate action. The bank's hypervisor infrastructure was approaching end-of-support, exposing it to significant operational and security risks, particularly for its mission-critical applications. “One of our legacy vendors imposed a restrictive lock-in as part of our contract renewal that came with a substantial cost increase. This would not only inflate our operational costs, but it also impeded our ability to innovate and respond quickly to market changes. As a leading financial institution, we must ensure unwavering compliance with stringent regulatory requirements, a task that becomes increasingly challenging with aging on-premises systems,” said Levesque.

This perfect storm of infrastructure obsolescence, vendor lock-in, rising costs, and regulatory pressures was hindering NBC's broader digital transformation goals, including its ambitious target of migrating 80% of data center workloads to the cloud while exiting its datacenter. Without strategic intervention, the company would compromise its operational efficiency, security posture, and competitive edge in the rapidly evolving financial services landscape.

Responding to the cost constraints imposed and vendor inflexibility, NBC made a strategic decision to avoid renewing the vendor contract. Instead, NBC worked with AWS Professional Services to put a rapid migration plan in place. The plan would be comprised of architectural excellence, automation, resiliency, and operations and adhere to an ambitious 9-month deadline. To begin, the company got organized for rapid migration execution. “We assembled a leadership team comprised of NBC and AWS ProServe leaders, and an overall team that included NBC IT infrastructure resources, application owners, business stakeholders, database specialists, storage specialists, network and security teams, resiliency and disaster recovery specialists, over 50 Rapid Migration team members, and over 100 NBC team members that coordinated seamlessly to execute the project,” said Levesque.

The team began by holding workshops focused on hyper-automation, account strategy and environment deployment. By mid-2024, NBC’s rapid migration landing zone and environment was ready to receive its first workloads. A month later, the bank migrated its first four virtual servers to AWS. As part of its hyper-automation framework, the bank streamlined and automated various aspects of the migration runbooks. The migration plan powered by hyper-automation helped accelerate the migration process of 2300 virtual servers to AWS including Amazon EC2, improving efficiency and reducing manual intervention in the execution of migration tasks.

The team built Automated Replication Agents - Streamlined AWS Application Migration Services (MGN) and AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) agent deployment for block-level replication at scale. NBC automated its AWS DRS settings synchronization to reduce manual configurations and implemented Multi-Region Disaster Recovery for cross-region resiliency from CA-Central-1 to EU-West-1. It also implemented Database High Availability using multi-AZ database configurations with synchronous replication.

“We achieved a 99.4% success rate for our hypervisor migration to AWS. We executed 170 cutovers and migrated an average of 41 servers per day.”

 Julie Levesque, Executive Vice President, Technology and Operations, National Bank of Canada

As part of its cloud transformation journey, NBC evaluated its hypervisor infrastructure of 2,300 servers and implemented a strategic optimization initiative. Through this process, the bank migrated its business-critical workloads to AWS, with all production servers being protected by robust disaster recovery services. This transformation enabled it to modernize its infrastructure while optimizing its operational footprint. “We’re extremely proud of the extended team's preparation and precision throughout this critical infrastructure transformation,” said Levesque. Because of the migration the bank realized significant lower compute and storage monthly cost on account of hypervisor licensing cost, hardware costs, and datacenter related costs including floorspace, energy, maintenance, and people. NBC also realized FTE related cost avoidance from compute, storage, and network management, refresh efforts, hypervisor maintenance, and hardware currency requirements.  “We achieved this outcome while working weekends and during nights across multiple time zones and business units. NBC is well positioned for the next phase of our cloud journey with a foundation for future innovations, enhanced team capabilities for cloud operations, and a strong partnership with AWS for our continued transformation,” said Levesque.