Across more than 5,400 IT projects studied by McKinsey and the University of Oxford, large programmes ran an average of 45% over budget and delivered 56% less value than predicted. These four well-documented migrations beat those odds.
The numbers at a glance
- 8× more streaming members after the move: Netflix
- 100+ PB of data moved, 4 data centres closed: Spotify
- 3 mo → min to build a development environment: Capital One
- $74.6M operating costs saved in two years: Dropbox
1. Netflix: seven years to an all-cloud platform
After a database corruption in August 2008 halted DVD shipments for three days, Netflix rebuilt its systems as cloud-native services on AWS instead of lifting and shifting them. It shut its last data-centre workloads in January 2016. By then it had eight times the streaming members of 2008, viewing had grown by three orders of magnitude, availability was approaching 99.99%, and cloud cost per streaming start was a fraction of the data-centre cost.
Lesson: Re-architect rather than copy, and migrate in stages you can roll back.
Source: Netflix, “Completing the Netflix Cloud Migration” (Feb 2016)
2. Spotify: 2,000 services to Google Cloud
Starting in 2015, around 100 teams in four regions moved about 2,000 services, 20,000 daily data-pipeline runs and more than 100 petabytes of data to Google Cloud. All user traffic ran on GCP by May 2017 and the four on-premise data centres were retired by 2018, freeing engineers to work on product instead of infrastructure.
Lesson: Give every team a clear migration path, tooling and a hard deadline.
Source: Spotify Engineering, Niklas Gustavsson (Chief Architect), “Views From The Cloud” (Dec 2019)
3. Capital One: first US bank all-in on the cloud
Over an eight-year programme begun in 2012, Capital One closed all eight of its on-premise data centres and moved to AWS, with about 2,000 applications running in the cloud. Building a development environment went from three months to minutes, disaster-recovery testing improved by 70%, and transaction errors and incident resolution fell by 50%.
Lesson: In a regulated industry, invest in controls and skills before you move the data.
Source: AWS customer story: Capital One all in on AWS
4. Dropbox: migrating off the public cloud
Dropbox moved about 90% of its users’ data from AWS to its own storage infrastructure, keeping AWS for the rest. Its 2018 IPO filing credited the project with $74.6 million in operating-cost savings over the following two years. It shows that the right target platform depends on scale and workload, not fashion.
Lesson: Model the total cost of each target platform before you choose one.
Sources: Dropbox, Inc. Form S-1 (SEC, Feb 2018); Data Center Knowledge, “Here’s How Much Money Dropbox Saved by Moving Out of the Cloud” (Mar 2018)
The takeaway
What they have in common: they were planned as long programmes rather than one big weekend, they changed the architecture instead of just copying it, and they tracked measurable outcomes such as cost, availability and delivery speed.
Talk to our specialists about your next migration, SAP data project or contract renewal.