St James’s Place (SJP), a UK-based wealth management firm, has started a project to migrate its entire IT infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS), to meet scalability requirements and focus on its core financial business rather than data centre management.
The move is expected to reduce time spent on operating data centre infrastructure to support the firm’s several enterprise applications, computerworlduk.com has reported.
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St James’s Place head of division for IT operation Andy Montgomery said, "We don’t want to focus on infrastructure and we don’t want to focus on managing data centres – our key business is wealth management, that is what we do, that is what we are good at," he said. "Amazon provides a wrapped set of services that we can leverage to build applications on."
The migration to the cloud started in 2014 when the IT unit was asked to manage a programme of change during a short time, which required multiple environments to be built.
The firm, which has around £5.2bn of funds under management, has now moved its IT infrastructure to AWS, using a virtual private cloud (VPC) connection, with nearly 85% of its systems in the cloud.
The firm is currently using AWS to manage a diverse range of software, such as its Microsoft Exchange environment, intranet, many enterprise applications and analytics tools.
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By GlobalData"We also run our CRM, our data warehouse, and all of our business processing systems apart from one legacy one in AWS. We don’t run Redshift right now but it is something we are aspiring to do," remarked Montgomery.
The legacy data centre of the company, which comprise nearly 15% of its overall IT estate, is connected to the AWS virtual private cloud through a "fast, low-latency, high bandwidth, direct connect pipe."
