When I first started as Natixis Investment Managers ’ Head of Technology for US distribution back in late 2014 , we had three priorities that guided our vision for the IT side of the business : pursue IT projects that helped the company manage risk , create or improve business efficiencies and enable new opportunities for innovation .
We also had a more tangible and focused goal to retire our in-house data center in less than three years . This mandate was non-negotiable because the company was moving its US headquarters to a state-of-the-art , “ green ” space . The new building was designed to be Boston ’ s most sustainable office building , and we did not want to build a new data center footprint . A new data center would not only have been costly to build and inefficient as compared to cloud offerings , but would also require continued capital investments and presented potential technical challenges in a retail-oriented area .
Now over three years later , we have eliminated our physical data center footprint ( we still house a percentage of our original internal compute and storage services in a Markley Group colocation facility ) and moved the majority of our workloads to the cloud . During the migration , we were also able to deliver on our mission to make IT more responsive to the needs of the business .
Engaging with CTP
To help us move to the cloud , we partnered with Cloud Technology Partners ( CTP ) to assist on the execution of a multi-phased project . In order to access Amazon Web Services ’ ( AWS ) ability to deliver the cloud provider benefits we were seeking , CTP conducted a Proof of Concept ( PoC ). We determined that AWS was able to meet our needs and that cloud technology would provide increased speed to market , agility and improved turnaround time .
After the initial PoC , we started a full-scale migration of our production workloads and worked with CTP to ensure all aspects of the cloud ’ s networking , security and operational management were secured to our operating standards . Our team worked closely with CTP over six months to conduct a Total Cost of Ownership ( TCO ) assessment ; identify all legal , compliance and technical requirements ; develop the necessary account structure ; establish network connectivity ; build a Minimum Viable Cloud ( MVC ); and address monitoring and operational concerns . Then we set up a production environment that would take advantage of multiple AWS services , including VPC , EC2 , S3 , Glacier , CloudWatch , SQS and CloudTrail .
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