A mid-Atlantic insurance carrier with 2,200 employees was running almost entirely on-premises. Aging data centers, hardware contracts expiring, no cloud operating model in place, and the board had set an aggressive target: reduce infrastructure costs by 30% in three years.
The client had invested heavily in on-premises infrastructure but faced rising operational costs, aging equipment, and limited scalability. No unified view of total cost of ownership, and IT leaders disagreed on whether cloud would actually save money or just shift costs.
The strategy was actionable because it was grounded in real infrastructure data, not cloud vendor promises. The board approved the roadmap without pushback because the financial model was conservative and the phasing reduced execution risk.
Rather than a top-down "move everything to cloud," we classified each workload individually. That meant some systems stayed on-premises. The board appreciated the honesty, and teams were more willing to commit because their specific systems had been analyzed, not just guessed at.
Bring the problem. We'll come back with a written brief: what to build, what to defer, and where AI actually moves the number. No deck pitches.