Quick Stats

Client: Onity Group
Strategic Partner: AWS  
Scale: 550+ servers migrated  
AHEAD Focus Areas: Platform Modernization  
Partner Role: Core cloud platform, AWS-native services, and landing zone architecture support 

Home Base 

Onity Group is a financial services company delivering mortgage servicing and origination solutions through its subsidiary, Onity Mortgage. Since 1988, it has served homeowners, business clients, and investors through a technology-enabled, customer-centric platform.

When it came time to exit a legacy environment, Onity saw an opportunity to do more than just relocate infrastructure. Leadership wanted to rethink how IT could improve flexibility, advance modernization, and help the company move into its next stage of growth.

A Foundation to Build On

Onity’s ambitions for its new environment went beyond a surface-level refresh.

• Room to Grow. Onity wanted an environment that could support priorities like AI, analytics, disaster recovery, and incremental application modernization. A cloud operating model could scale alongside both business and infrastructure needs.
• Building a Financial Case. Onity also needed a clear, data-backed view into AWS billing, consumption, and long-term value, so the migration could be evaluated as a sound business investment.
• Balancing Speed with Control. Once the work got underway, the team needed to move at meaningful scale without disrupting business or creating unnecessary surprises during execution. That required a comprehensive plan built around application dependencies and careful workload sequencing.

This wasn’t just a migration in the narrow technical sense, but a broader IT transformation effort meant to reshape how Onity did business.

Building More Than a New Address 

For a project of this size, Onity needed partners who could work closely with internal teams to help connect strategy, architecture, and execution.

AHEAD’s platform modernization experience and program structure were vital in shaping and orchestrating the migration strategy. AWS provided the cloud platform and native services. And Onity’s own internal expertise brought the operational context needed to make the migration work in practice.

Together, they turned Onity’s platform exit into a full-scale operating model change.

Phase 1 – Advise 

Early in the process, the teams put Onity’s Configuration Management Database to work. The CMDB became the basis for application dependency mapping, making it possible to see how systems related to one another and sequence migration waves with much more confidence.

That level of visibility helped shape the process from the start. Rather than move workloads with partial information, the teams could plan around real dependencies, reduce downstream risk, and create a more controlled path to execution.

Onity also built a detailed financial model grounded in AWS billing structures and resource consumption patterns. Like visibility, cost was built into the strategy from the beginning, giving the team stronger financial fluency around the migration to AWS.

Why the Groundwork Mattered:

The best migrations start before the first workload even moves. Operational and financial clarity took guesswork out of the equation, allowing teams to accomplish more, with greater confidence. AHEAD helped further enforce that discipline with a steady cadence of two migration weekends per month, keeping momentum high and disruption in check.

Phase 2 – Build 

AHEAD and AWS rebuilt Onity’s environment as a multi-account AWS architecture grounded in AWS Landing Zone principles and the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

AWS-native services played a central role in the new model:

• Amazon EC2 supported migrated workloads.
• Amazon WorkSpaces provided stable, scalable desktop infrastructure.
• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery strengthened resiliency and business continuity.

The WorkSpaces rollout, in particular, moved faster because the right expertise was already in the room. AHEAD had deep experience with enterprise desktop transformation and brought proven patterns for deploying platforms at scale. This went hand-in-hand with AWS’s cloud desktop infrastructure and direct technical support, and Onity IT’s VDI knowledge, which helped accelerate configuration, testing, and rollout.

Migration waves weren’t planned in isolation, either, but carefully coordinated with business operations and customer-facing teams on timing, sequencing, and risk tolerance. The migration and workloads were able to move without creating disruption for the people who would feel it first and most directly.

How It Came to Life:

The three teams compressed what could have been a lengthy and disruptive transition into a fast, smooth deployment. The result was a high-quality end-user experience from day one, and a flexible, resilient environment for enterprise-scale operations.

Phase 3 – Run 

The new model saw immediate gains in cost transparency and simplified management. With a stable AWS foundation in place, Onity no longer had to spend so much time managing legacy complexity. It could focus fully on day-two operations and modernization work that had been harder to pursue in the previous environment.

How It Kept Delivering:

The value of the migration didn’t stop once the new model went live. Onity now had a practical path to improve workloads over time, along with better cost visibility, flexibility, and a stronger foundation for future initiatives.

Same Business, Stronger Bones 

Working with AHEAD and AWS, Onity migrated 550+ servers and 50+ workstations to a modern AWS-native environment in record time and with zero rollbacks.

• More Flexibility in the Budget. By moving off legacy platform licensing and infrastructure overhead, Onity could align resources more closely with actual demand. The financial framework built at the beginning of the migration has continued to help the company evaluate future investments.
• Steady Gains Over Time. Consumption-based infrastructure made incremental modernization far more practical. Instead of waiting for another major transformation cycle, Onity can now selectively modernize applications and adopt additional AWS-native services where they make sense, on its own terms and at its own pace.
• Ready for What’s Next. Modern landing zone architecture and improved disaster recovery have strengthened overall resilience and security. The AWS-native foundation also enables Onity to accelerate new initiatives in AI, data, and analytics that had been harder to support in the previous environment.
• Faster to Adapt. With less platform complexity and more operational flexibility, Onity can now respond more easily to business demands. That means quicker reactions to growth initiatives, customer experience enhancements, or the kind of market shifts that don’t wait politely for IT roadmaps.

What’s Next 

Onity is now in a stronger position to scale with demand, operate with greater flexibility, and keep modernizing without the constraints of its previous environment, giving way to a more flexible foundation for future growth.

Thanks to AHEAD’s strategic guidance and AWS’s powerful cloud foundation, Onity elevated IT beyond infrastructure, with a platform in place for continued growth, modernization, and whatever comes next.