Philip Morris International Migrates Over 400 Services to AWS in Business Transformation

PMI has been investing in smoke-free alternatives, including heated tobacco and e-vapor products, since 2008 and aims to have more than two-thirds of its revenue come from smoke-free products by 2030. The new focus of its business is to adopt the technology it needs to be a business-to-consumer company, including digitizing its applications. For this transition to succeed, the entire business needed to be on board with the cloud migration, employees needed to be trained on AWS, and the business needed to become more customer focused.

By migrating to AWS, PMI sought to improve its agility and scalability to serve a larger customer base while adhering to data protection and security standards such as the GDPR, Good x Practice, and System and Organization Controls. Changing to a direct-to-consumer business model meant adhering to additional regulations, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Using AWS, PMI was able to create a secure technology stack by design so every workload would be compliant with GDPR and other requirements. “Due to the shared accountability model of the technology stack, our teams can focus more on essential workloads,” says Farid Boutaghane, chief technology officer at PMI. “From a compliance perspective, using AWS has been instrumental for us.”

PMI successfully migrated 400 applications to AWS in 2 years starting in August 2020 and is now all in on AWS. The company hosts most of its data in a data lake on AWS, and it has opened digital channels to interact more directly with its consumers. The experience of PMI’s migration, which was both large and efficiently achieved, taught it four distinct lessons.

The first lesson PMI learned from its migration was to migrate with a sense of urgency. Initially, PMI was met with resistance to migration from some of its business partners and had a lack of internal buy-in to the business case, which resulted in limited traction for the initiative. To create a sense of urgency, the company adopted a “burning platform” strategy to create a compelling reason for continuing the migration. PMI sold all its data centers before the migration began, putting a 3-year time limit on the migration. This time limit improved focus for PMI and its business partners and virtually eliminated the opportunity for more delays. PMI created #NoWayBack internally to communicate across the organization that the migration was a one-way process with a limited time frame.

The second insight was to take the time to adequately plan and strategize the migration before it begins. At first, PMI tried to meet its tight deadlines with an aggressive “lift and shift” strategy, but this approach yielded suboptimal results. When it realized it needed a different approach, PMI reached out to AWS Professional Services, a global team of experts that can assist businesses in realizing desired outcomes when using AWS. PMI worked alongside AWS Professional Services and IBM, its selected delivery partner, to align with AWS Well-Architected, a framework to learn, measure, and build using architectural best practices. “Having AWS Professional Services on board has been invaluable for us from the perspective of making the right decisions based on similar migrations and expert recommendations,” says Boutaghane.

The third insight from PMI’s migration was to explain internally the tangible benefits of migrating without focusing solely on costs. Cost benefits often come further down the line, whereas other gains of migrating to AWS are more immediate. Using AWS, 70 percent of PMI’s applications now have automated deployment pipelines, which means the company can implement changes 80 percent faster. Because PMI has templated workloads for the cloud, it also achieves effective data protection and security measures. Across the board, PMI achieved a 50 percent improvement in performance and can scale to meet the needs of a growing consumer base.

Cost benefits are also coming to fruition. Using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)—a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud—PMI is saving up to 50 percent on certain costs. “As we continue to modernize using AWS, we will see very tangible cost savings coming through,” says Boutaghane.

PMI’s migration was a success in part because of the fourth lesson it learned: mandate change from the top down while supporting change from the bottom up. To support change from the bottom up, PMI built the AWS Cloud Guild, an academy internal to PMI with an array of educational programs and events. PMI employees used this academy to gain AWS Certification, which validates technical skills and cloud expertise. “After training in the AWS Cloud Guild, people felt confident, competent, and convinced to do the job,” says Boutaghane. More than 500 PMI employees have achieved AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, with around 200 achieving more advanced certifications.

PMI continues to prioritize its sustainability goals, including lessening postconsumer product waste and reducing the company’s net carbon emissions. PMI reduced its water use by 47 percent between 2018 and 2022 and aims to achieve a landfill diversion rate of at least 99 percent. By using AWS—which is on a path to power its operations using virtually 100 percent renewable energy by 2025—PMI can continue to achieve its carbon reduction goals while improving its business. “Reducing carbon emissions is a very important goal for our company and is embedded into our strategy,” says Boutaghane. “Using AWS, we can progress our goals without putting a strain on the internal organization.”