First Merchants was in an aggressive growth and acquisition mode, but their legacy operating model was unable to efficiently take on the various platforms and workloads of the financial institutions they were acquiring. They wanted to extend their data center to quickly start leveraging cloud operating models that modernized their technology approach, with the goal of eventually working their way into the cloud over the next 3 to 5 years, while also having a data center footprint by employing a hybrid cloud model. AHEAD’s relationship with First Merchants began with a two-day visioning workshop during which it was discovered that an agile, native AWS approach was much better suited to their business, operations, and budget. 

Through close collaboration, AHEAD was able to expedite the cloud journey due to the increased knowledge and skillsets of the combined teams. This allowed the AHEAD team to reallocate those dollars and quickly shift the project focus to accelerating the migration-strategy phase. AHEAD also recommended SCPs for limiting deployment to approved Regions, and implemented a strategy for deploying users and roles for SSO configuration.