Legacy on-premise → AWS
The organisation was led through its full transition from legacy on-premise infrastructure to a modern AWS cloud environment.
Case study · Life sciences Cloud transformation at an
Cloud transformation at an
S&P 100 industrial & life sciences group.
A 140-person engineering organisation led from legacy on-premise infrastructure to a modern AWS environment — with vendor resourcing restructured to cut operational costs by 25%.
140Person engineering org migrated
25%Operational cost reduction
AWSOn-premise → cloud
Delivered by ICAN’s leadership in prior engagements and senior roles.
The challenge
Move a regulated estate without dropping it.
A 140-person engineering organisation inside an S&P 100 industrial and life sciences group was running on legacy on-premise infrastructure — with the operating costs, scaling limits and vendor structures that come with it. In a regulated environment, the systems being moved cannot simply pause while the estate changes underneath them.
The transformation had two jobs at once: move the estate to a modern cloud environment, and restructure how the organisation was resourced to run it.
What was actually done
People, platform and vendors — changed together.
A 140-person organisation moved
Not a lift-and-shift of servers alone: the engineering organisation itself — its teams, skills and ways of working — made the move with the estate.
Vendor resourcing restructured
The vendor and resourcing model was rebuilt around the new platform, removing structures the on-premise estate no longer justified.
25% operational cost reduction
The combined platform and resourcing change reduced overall operational costs by a quarter — a durable structural saving, not a one-off cut.
What it demonstrates
The migration is the easy half.
Cloud migrations fail on what surrounds them — the operating discipline, the vendor structures and the people change — not on the platform itself. This engagement moved all of it together, at S&P 100 scale, in a regulated industry. That is the surrounding discipline ICAN now sells as managed ownership and SRE: estates run as code, to explicit reliability targets.
Your estate next
Carrying an estate that's due to move?
Tell us where your platform is today and where it needs to be. We'll come back with a pragmatic path — and the operating discipline to run what lands.