At a glance:
Company: Danske Bank
The Challenge: Migrating 1,000+ applications and 25 petabytes of data without disrupting 24/7 banking operations
The Solution: Hyper-automation using Cutover's automated runbooks in partnership with AWS
The Impact: Reduced runbook creation time from 4 weeks to 4 seconds, vastly decreasing error rates and fast-tracking the migration schedule
The Problem: A monumental migration built around 24/7 uptime
When Danske Bank committed to a strategic cloud migration, they faced a logistical mountain. The scale of the project was staggering: over 1,000 applications and 25 petabytes of data needed to be moved to the cloud - all without a single moment of customer-facing disruption.
For a major financial institution, downtime simply is not an option.
"We're a bank. We don't just get to go offline, whether it's for upgrades or migrations. We have to service our customers 24/7 every day of the year."
- Ashish Shekhar, SVP, Global Head of Technology Platforms, Danske Bank
Typically, an organization of Danske Bank's size would require five to eight years to complete a migration of this magnitude. The traditional approach - scaling up headcount - brings its own bottlenecks: a sharp increase in manual errors and complex management overhead. Brute-forcing the migration simply wasn't feasible. A brand-new approach was needed.
The Solution: Hyper-automation with Cutover and AWS
To fundamentally change the economics of their cloud migration, Danske Bank partnered with Cutover and AWS to build automated runbooks driven by hyper-automation.
"Automated runbooks is what we do at Cutover. In this case, it's automated migration runbooks and templates. I've never seen this scale of innovation for such a complex migration."
- Ky Nichol, CEO, Cutover
Through this partnership, Danske Bank fully automated not just the steps within each runbook, but the actual creation of the runbooks themselves. The joint solution delivered the speed and precision needed to execute thousands of complex cloud moves - without jeopardising the bank's strict zero-downtime requirements.
The Results: From 4 weeks to 4 seconds
With strong executive support and a proven methodology, the project quickly generated its own momentum. The business impact has been staggering, fundamentally shifting how Danske Bank approaches digital transformation.
- Unprecedented speed: Runbooks that used to take four weeks to build are now being generated in four seconds.
- Ahead of schedule: The team has already smoothly migrated over 100 applications, putting them well ahead of initial targets.
- Fewer errors, higher accuracy: Removing manual intervention has drastically lowered error rates - replacing human risk with full automation, orchestration, and visibility.
- Reclaimed resources: By saving massive amounts of time, energy, and cost, Danske Bank's engineers are now free to focus on building better products for customers.
"Cutover's runbooks have enabled us to realise our vision of hyper-automation… We are literally turning months into minutes."
- Ashish Shekhar, SVP, Global Head of Technology Platforms, Danske Bank
