Migrating from On Premises to AWS in Less than 43 Days with PrivatBank

PrivatBank was founded in 1992 and was nationalized in 2016. The bank has 1,200 physical branches and nearly 20 million customers, and it services on average 2.5 million clients’ transactions per hour. To further improve its customers’ lives, PrivatBank also offers Privat24, an application that provides 147 services. In January 2022, the application had 15 million users—more than a third of Ukraine’s population. When the war came, PrivatBank needed to make sure its customers still had access to vital services, such as access to salaries, savings, payments, and cash transfers.

There were a few options that PrivatBank considered when it realized it needed to make a change. Vice president and chief operating officer of PrivatBank, Mariusz Kaczmarek, created and supervised the taskforce. One option was to migrate physically, moving its hardware into data centers in other parts of the country or abroad. Another was to switch off its services. Neither of these options would help the bank to secure its operations and support customers without significant downtime, so PrivatBank chose the only option that met its needs: migrating to the cloud. PrivatBank was not using cloud solutions widely due to the legislation in Ukraine limiting the use of public cloud services by financial institutions, followed by restricted data residency. Due to the war and at the request of PrivatBank and other financial institutions, the legislation was suspended.

The company migrated its critical workloads to AWS to immediately protect its services from physical threats. “We had a small team who maintained digital business infrastructure on AWS before, and they started teaching and helping us to make our teams sure a migration was possible,” says Aleksey Zaets, head of IT architecture at PrivatBank.

PrivatBank migrated its main data center to AWS in less than 43 days, then migrated its other data center to AWS over the course of 6 months and was fully migrated by June 2023. “We used what was available to clone our infrastructure by selecting AWS products that were as close as possible to it,” says Kaczmarek, who played a major role in the company’s decision to migrate to the cloud and was an executive force during migration. In October 2023, PrivatBank was using over 70 AWS services across its business. “This lift-and-shift migration used AWS infrastructure and services and should be viewed as a huge change management program because, in a very short period of time, technology, processes, and infrastructure for IT staff changed,” says Kaczmarek.

Prior to the war, PrivatBank used, among other cybersecurity solutions, AWS Shield, a managed distributed denial of service protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS, to protect its website and Privat24. The company expanded its use of AWS Shield in 2021 to protect its web applications as it migrated them to AWS. “Using AWS Shield was a huge benefit for us,” says Krzysztof Ostrowski, information security head at PrivatBank. “We could focus on the migration process rather than spending time defending from cyberattacks.”

For the migration, PrivatBank initially used VMware Cloud on AWS, a managed service that combines compute, network, and storage capabilities in a fully supported, ready-to-run service. By migrating in this way, PrivatBank could prioritize the speed of its stabilization while keeping its infrastructure largely the same.

PrivatBank also used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, to redeploy its infrastructure. PrivatBank uses Amazon EC2 for core banking applications such as account management, loan processing, and credit scoring systems, as well as online banking to provide customers with secure access to their accounts, transaction histories, bill payments, and other financial services. PrivatBank also uses AWS Application Migration Service, which minimizes time-intensive, error-prone manual processes by automating the conversion of source servers to run natively on AWS, to automate migrating 9,000 on-premises virtual machines. It used Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)—a simple-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service designed for Amazon EC2—to gain additional storage performance for its databases.

At the beginning of the migration journey, less than 10 IT staff within the company knew how to build on AWS, and with 500 applications, thousands of servers, and 4 PB of data, the migration was a tall task. “It was a significant contribution of AWS teams to achieve our goals in a very short time,” says Kaczmarek.

In the first 90 days on the cloud, PrivatBank improved the total cost of ownership by implementing best practices on tagging, cost allocation, rightsizing, elasticity, and resource modernization using AWS pricing models. This increased the company’s IT cost transparency.

Since its migration, the company has also upscaled, optimized, and modernized its infrastructure using AWS. “We have gained agility, stability, and control by migrating,” says Kaczmarek. “There are many benefits the bank has achieved using AWS.”

Using AWS, the company has begun modernizing its systems using AWS native services for machine learning and serverless workloads. PrivatBank teams are now building cloud-based applications with a modernized infrastructure. By using AWS-managed services rather than performing on-premises patching, the company has saved both time and effort. PrivatBank has also elevated its security posture using Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service that continuously monitors AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and delivers detailed security findings for visibility and remediation.

“We took the risk under tremendous external pressure, and we achieved a huge step toward modernization of the bank using AWS,” says Kaczmarek. “We are now focusing on the modernization of our applications and services and have started thinking about how to expand our products and services and bring new solutions, forgetting about the limitations and obstacles of the past.”