Cloud migration in financial services is rarely straightforward. Compliance requirements, legacy infrastructure, and internal risk aversion can make even the earliest stages of a migration project feel like an uphill battle. For Opti9, one of the biggest early hurdles wasn’t the migration itself… it was proving the case for it.
The Challenge: Making the Invisible Visible
Opti9 was tasked with accelerating cloud adoption for a key financial services customer. The goal was clear, but the path forward hit an immediate wall: the assessment tools available at the time required significant manual effort and didn’t deliver the granularity needed to make a compelling, data-backed argument.
When you’re trying to convince a risk-conscious financial services organization to move its infrastructure to the cloud, “we think your servers are overprovisioned” doesn’t cut it. You need numbers. You need specificity. And you need the customer to see it for themselves.
The Solution: Granular Data, Automated Enrichment
Opti9 turned to Cloudamize to conduct a rapid, low-effort AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) assessment. Rather than relying on manual data gathering, the Cloudamize agent captured utilization metrics every 30 seconds, giving the team a highly granular, real-world picture of how infrastructure was actually being used.
Alongside raw utilization data, Cloudamize’s application dependency mapping automatically grouped servers by complexity, making it straightforward to organize infrastructure into logical migration waves.
But Opti9 didn’t stop there. The team layered AI-driven data enrichment on top of the Cloudamize output, adding Server Disposition, AWS target services, and streamlined security group planning and migration wave descriptions.
The result was a comprehensive, consultant-quality migration plan built in a fraction of the time it would have taken with traditional tools.
The Result: The Data Spoke for Itself
When the assessment was complete, the findings were striking: nearly 100% of the customer’s on-premises servers had right-sizing opportunities identified. Put differently, virtually the entire infrastructure estate was confirmed to be overprovisioned.
This wasn’t a vague estimate, it was backed by granular utilization data captured automatically by the Cloudamize agent. The customer could see exactly how their servers were performing in practice, not just on paper.
With that level of evidence in hand, the enhanced planning process led directly to customer sign-off on the Statement of Work (SOW). The assessment didn’t just surface an opportunity — it built the trust needed to move forward.
The Takeaway
For cloud migration partners working in regulated industries like financial services, the quality of your assessment directly determines whether you win the engagement. Vague projections and manually assembled spreadsheets create doubt. Granular, automated, AI-enriched data creates confidence.
Opti9’s approach with Cloudamize demonstrates that the right tooling doesn’t just save time, it changes the conversation entirely. When a customer can see that nearly every server they own is underutilized, the question shifts from “should we migrate?” to “how soon can we start?”
Author
