Automating data migration is key to supporting a move to the cloud.

Scott Carter, chief technology officer at payments firm TSYS, shared lessons the company learned from its migration to Amazon Web Services at the recent Amazon Web Services Symposium in New York. TSYS was acquired for $21.5 billion in 2019 by Fortune 500 payments and technology provider Global Payments and now operates as a subsidiary.

TSYS’ cloud journey began four or five years ago, prior to the acquisition, Carter noted.

“Not only for us … but our customers wanted to understand, ‘How are you going to [migrate data to the cloud] without disrupting our business?’” Carter said. “So that’s something where we’ve invested a lot of time and effort in automation.”

In 2020, Global Payments said its partnership with AWS would allow it to provide a cloud-based issuer processing platform to financial institutions of all sizes. Carter shared four other lessons learned from a year of collaborating with AWS:

1. Consider the bigger picture. When moving systems to the cloud, “Really think about multi-region from day one, so that you build it into the architecture instead of thinking about that afterward on the back end, and all the challenges that come with that,” he said.
2. Choose informed stakeholders. Stakeholders play a big role when migrating systems to the cloud; look for those who have experience with such migrations. “You’ve got to have people on the journey with you that understand that it’s going to be an iterative process … that you are going to run into challenges, you’re going to run into walls and at certain points in the process, you’re going to have to back up and rethink some things as you go,” Carter said. Involving stakeholders with such experience can help get past those challenging points, he added.
3. Look for clients who will help beta test changes. Finding clients who are willing to beta test system changes is “super important,” Carter said. “We continually look for those types of stakeholders that are interested in doing that with us.”
4. IT services will change. It’s “critically important” to look at traditional information security and compliance teams and inject an engineering approach, Carter said. “To have engineers that are dedicated to compliance work, we think that’s really important,” he noted. 

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