Thomson Reuters completes large-scale migration of mission-critical workloads to the AWS cloud

Thomson Reuters has confirmed the completion of a large-scale migration of thousands of servers and hundreds of its revenue-generating apps to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

The multi-national media conglomerate said the migration forms a critical part of a wider digital transformation push that is geared towards boosting its business agility, pace of innovation and data analytics capabilities.

The company is a long-standing AWS user, having previously gone public about the work it has done with the public cloud giant in the past that centred on the use of data analytics to help bring about user experience improvements to the digital products and services it offers its clients.

These include software packages that are used by organisations in the legal, tax, accounting and compliance professions that are designed to help the people working in these industries understand their respective sectors better.

The cloud migration part of this work began in 2018, with the organisation tapping into the professional services expertise and managed services support offered by AWS, as well as multiple AWS-certified consultancy partners, to deliver on this portion of the project.

The decision to make use of these services is credited by Thomson Reuters as playing a major factor in its ability to complete the migration five months ahead of schedule.

Alongside this, the company has continued to expand its use of Amazon’s cloud services to include elements of its analytics, database, serverless, storage, machine learning and security product portfolios.

It has also made full use of the cloud giant’s machine learning model building offering, Amazon SageMaker, to enable the development of an internal platform that will pave the way for its developers and data scientists to gain insights from real-time and historical data in a fully managed environment.

“The platform saves developers and data scientists countless hours of coding by providing all of the components used for machine learning in a single toolset so models get to production faster with much less effort and at a lower cost,” the company said in a statement.

Justin Wright, vice-president of architecture and development at Thomson Reuters, said the over-arching aim of its technology tie-up with Amazon is to “develop insightful new products and services” to help its clients change the way they work and operate.

“AWS is a trusted resource for us – especially AWS Managed Services and AWS Professional Services – providing the expertise to accelerate our move to cloud and helped migrate datacentres ahead of schedule,” Wright added.

Greg Pearson, vice-president of worldwide commercial sales at AWS, said it is working with the company to ensure its clients in the legal, tax, accounting and news industries get the information they need as quickly as possible to inform the work they do.

“By leveraging AWS’s depth and breadth of services with the expertise of AWS Managed Services, Thomson Reuters is able to eliminate the heavy lifting of managing infrastructure operations and focus on innovating new ways to deliver in-depth information and digital solutions to deliver new and timely insights to customers around the world,” Pearson added.