The client, a global banking and insurance group operating in more than 40 countries, had grown — organically and through acquisition — into an estate of 18 data centers running on aging, heterogeneous infrastructure. Hardware was past end-of-service-life, the virtualization layer was out of support on vSphere 6.5 and 6.7, and every facility carried its own operating model, tooling, and risk profile. Several sites were running below 35% utilization, application dependencies were undocumented, and disaster recovery was backup-based with a 24-hour RPO and an 8-hour RTO that no longer met the group's regulatory obligations. Previous consolidation attempts had stalled because no one could say with confidence what would break if a workload moved — and the new migration had to happen with zero disruption to trading, payments, and policy-administration systems, against lease-exit dates already committed to the board.
Aconic designed a target platform first: three regional active–active data center pairs across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC — six facilities in total — each running a standardized VMware Cloud Foundation stack (vSphere, vSAN, NSX) on refreshed, vSAN-ready hyperconverged nodes. Discovery ran on Aconic's Migrazo platform, building a complete inventory of 5,200+ VMs, their dependencies, and environment context, and scoring every workload for migration risk and readiness — producing a defensible 6R disposition for every application. Nine percent of the estate was retired outright before a single workload moved.
Migration ran through VMware HCX as the mobility fabric: live and replication-assisted vMotion moved workloads with no downtime window for 94% of the estate, while a self-service automation catalog with policy guardrails took VM provisioning from 2–3 weeks down to under 30 minutes. Eleven planned migration waves moved tightly coupled application groups together, sequenced around trading calendars, regulatory freezes, and lease-exit dates, each ending with a formal handover to the client's operations team. As legacy sites emptied, Aconic managed secure data destruction, asset disposition, and lease handback — 12 facilities exited on or ahead of their committed dates.
Over 16 months, the client went from 18 data centers to 6, migrated more than 5,200 VMs across 11 waves with zero P1 incidents, and cut projected 5-year infrastructure TCO by 42%. Disaster recovery moved from a 24-hour RPO / 8-hour RTO to a 15-minute RPO / 1-hour RTO validated in quarterly failover tests, and NSX micro-segmentation brought zero-trust security to 100% of workloads. In the client's own words: "We set out to exit data centers, and we ended up with a private cloud our teams actually want to build on ... sixteen months, no missed regulatory deadlines, no customer-facing outages."