AMP has announced that by next year it will migrate all its remaining on-premise workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

The move forms a critical part of the group’s three-year transformation program, with the “accelerated” cloud push expected to “drive simplification of [AMP’s] products and services and increase innovation”, the company said in a statement.

AMP has so far migrated more than half of its applications to cloud-native environments – a process it began in 2012.

By 2022, “100 per cent of its on-premises workloads” will be on AWS cloud.

The choice of AWS, which dominates the public cloud (IaaS and PaaS) infrastructure market, will give AMP increased “speed of service” allowing the financial services giant to “more effectively scale operations”, it said.

Speaking with FST Media earlier today, Abdullah Khan, AMP’s enterprise infrastructure chief, confirmed that while the company is, for now, embracing Amazon as its sole cloud provider, its overarching “multi-cloud strategy has not changed”, leaving open the door to future non-AWS collaborations – where it sees fit.

“AMP is taking a structured approach to cloud adoption to drive the simplification and modernisation of our services – our multi-cloud strategy has not changed.”

“As part of this, we will continue to move from on-premises services to AWS cloud-based IaaS or PaaS.

“In some instances, services will go straight to PaaS or SaaS. For services that are, or will be, more suited for PaaS or SaaS-based solutions, we will look at broader cloud eco-systems – inclusive but not limited to AWS. This is how our multi-cloud strategy will come into effect.”

Khan said AMP’s long-term partnership with AWS “essentially enables us to establish a strategic ‘cloud-only’ hosting platform for AMP, accelerating migration of remaining on-prem workloads to AWS Cloud, whilst continuing to drive adoption of advanced and mature AWS and other cloud services for cloud-native applications as appropriate”.

Featuring at FST’s Future of Financial Services, Sydney conference last November, Khan stressed the point that “no one cloud can solve all [business] requirements”.

“We strongly believe that every organisation is on its way to becoming a multi-cloud customer.”

He did, however, flag existing challenges with coordinating multi-cloud ecosystems “in a unified way”, which likely encouraged the currently all-in approach with AWS.

“We looked at more of a holistic approach, or ‘horses for courses’ as I call it, making sure we put the right value on the right cloud provider. However, in terms of looking at that relationship and partnership, it’s more around what is our strategic intent and what sort of capabilities we need which are natively strong from the cloud provider perspective.”

Beyond leveraging AWS Managed Services, which will support the migration of AMP’s remaining on-premise workloads to AWS cloud, AMP also spruiked the added benefits of AWS’s developer-ready Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Guard Duty, providing additional security controls and “embedded, automated tools that help to meet compliance requirements”.

Commenting on the move, Jacqui Visch, AMP’s chief technology and data officer, said that embracing wholesale cloud infrastructure will help deliver “digitalised and data-driven experiences” at speed and scale.

“Cloud presents us with the opportunity to create a tech-first culture. Working in the cloud makes us more agile and with this comes the ability to foster innovation and deliver automated services at speed for our clients.”

“An important component of any client-led transformation is the ability to execute and create digitalised and data-driven experiences.”

Khan added that the AWS partnership “is well-supported across the organisation”, enabling the organisation to accelerate its digital ambitions.

“We have enjoyed working closely with AWS on the migration and look forward to continuing our long relationship with them.”