TECHNOLOGY

BT signs five-year deal with AWS as cloud provider for internal apps

Published

3 years ago

May 5, 2022

Duncan is an award-winning editor with more than 20 years experience in journalism. Having launched his tech journalism career as editor of Arabian Computer News in Dubai, he has since edited an array of tech and digital marketing publications, including Computer Business Review, TechWeekEurope, Figaro Digital, Digit and Marketing Gazette.

BT’s Digital unit has chosen Amazon Web Services (AWS) to be its preferred internal apps cloud provider as part of its drive to transform legacy infrastructure and internal applications to a new cloud-first architecture.

The effort will help accelerate BT’s plans to build and innovate faster on a new suite of digital products and services and reduce costs in IT maintenance, delivering more value for its Consumer, Enterprise, Global and Openreach customers.

This agreement is one element of BTs broader modernisation programme that aims to deliver £2 billion in gross annualised savings by end FY24, as BT retires legacy applications, associated infrastructure, and data centres. The collaboration with AWS is a cornerstone of BT Digital’s plans to deliver an industry-leading, cloud-first architecture for BT Group. It represents a dramatic simplification from the company’s current IT estate, and is designed to be cloud-native, microservices-based, and fully modular.

This approach will boost BT’s ability to move rapidly in response to and anticipation of customer needs, permitting for security, privacy and compliance by design.

Thomas Dücke, COO, BT Digital, said: “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.

Adolfo Hernandez, VP and general manager, Telecom Global Industry Business Unit, AWS, says: “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.”

Over the next five years, BT intends to continue to make significant investments and use of AWS technology to accelerate its digital transformation with a particular focus on application workloads via containers and serverless technologies.