BT signs five-year deal with AWS to revamp legacy infrastructure and ready it for the cloud

The digital arm of BT has signed a five-year cloud deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that will focus on supporting the telco giant with migrating its legacy infrastructure and applications off-premise.

The deal is part of an ongoing cloud-first push by BT Digital that is geared towards providing the wider BT Group with access to cloud-native, microservices-based and modular infrastructure resources.

This work enable allow the firm to phase out legacy applications and infrastructure and pave the way for BT to shutter some of its datacentres, the company confirmed in a statement.

BT has also committed to making “significant investments” in AWS technologies, with particular focus on application workloads via containers and serverless technologies, the statement added. 

The AWS deal forms part of a broader modernisation programme that BT is embarking on, which is geared towards helping the firm deliver £2bn in gross annualised savings by the end of the 2024 financial year. 

BT said the revamp of its legacy infrastructure will enable it to cut its IT maintenance costs, while also allowing it to bring to market new services for its clients at a faster pace.

“We have a big opportunity when it comes to modernising our infrastructure, and our collaboration with AWS is a key one for us as we deliver the transformation needed to accelerate BT,” said Thomas Dücke, COO at BT Digital.

Adolfo Hernandez, vice-president and general manager within the Telecom Global Industry Business Unit at AWS, said: “BT’s move to cloud-first applications can help reduce IT maintenance costs, streamline operations and help it better adapt to evolving customer needs. Plus, the AWS pay-as-you-go model offers flexibility, so BT only pays for the IT needed.”

AWS and BT already have a fair amount of shared history, as the two firms are long-term collaborators, having worked together for a while on helping BT’s enterprise customers migrate their own applications and workloads to the Amazon public cloud.

As previously reported by Computer Weekly, BT Digital recently signed a similar five-year deal with Google Cloud, which is focused on it using the search giant’s portfolio of artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics tools to develop new customer offerings and uncover new revenue streams.

The Google Cloud and BT Digital technology tie-up is also centred on the creation of a group-wide data and AI fabric, to which all parts of BT’s business will have access so they can create more personalised services for end-users, and unlock new business use cases.