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

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.

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.

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.”