Capital One Completes Migration from Data Centers to AWS, Becomes First US Bank to Announce Going All In on the Cloud

Once Capital One had set its sights on the cloud, it began the long-term planning for how to exit its on-premises data centers and reimagine itself as a technology company with a completely new approach to talent management, technology development, and operations. “We didn’t start on day one knowing exactly how this would all unfold over many years,” Nims says. “We knew that we were embarking on a massive transformation. Success required that we have, first, a vision of where we were going; second, the courage to make a bold move; and third, the tenacity and perseverance to make it through.”

The migration project list was long, but one area that Capital One considered early in its planning process was educating its technology associates to support and succeed in a cloud environment. Capital One created an AWS Navigator initiative and invited solutions architects from its AWS account team to lead Tech Talks and workshops on best practices for using AWS services in the Capital One environment. Capital One also designated monthly, meeting-free “Invest in Yourself” days, giving its technology associates time to work toward their AWS Certification. In addition, Capital One also engaged AWS to participate in Capital One’s annual software engineering conference, SECON, which offers its associates keynotes, demonstrations, breakouts, and in-depth sessions with subject matter experts.

Investing to educate its technology team helped Capital One become expert in running its infrastructure on AWS, but the company had even bigger aspirations: it planned to bring application development in-house and become great at building software. Capital One scaled its engineering organization and hired top software talent, both experienced engineers and new graduates from the best engineering schools across the United States—massively growing the size of its technology team to 11,000 members during its 8-year migration journey.

Not only did Capital One bring in the right people to create industry-leading app experiences, but it also changed the way it managed its technology operations. The company switched from “waterfall” to agile software development, enabling iteration; it shifted to DevOps so that it could remove silos and create team ownership; and it expanded its use of open-source products and its participation in open-source communities to gain faster access to both ideas and talent. In addition, Capital One began using Operational Readiness Reviews from the AWS Well-Architected Framework for conducting preproduction software reviews by distinguished engineers. This helped keep application design and operations aligned with cloud architectural best practices.

By migrating to the cloud and changing its technology operations, Capital One has been able to scale to meet demand and move faster in a variety of ways. First, on AWS, Capital One can provision infrastructure almost instantly at a virtually unlimited scale, using as much or as little computing and storage as its applications need—and paying only for what it uses. The company has also seen an increase in its pace of innovation, going from quarterly and monthly application updates to releasing new code multiple times per day. Moreover, Capital One has reduced the average time needed to build a development environment from 3 months to only minutes.

System availability and disaster recovery is another area where Capital One has seen significant improvements. The company performs regular business continuity exercises and technical recovery exercises to ensure resiliency, but on AWS, it has shifted to active-active architecture with automated failover. As a result, Capital One has cut its disaster recovery time in these testing exercises by 70 percent, and it has reduced both critical incident resolution time and the number of transaction errors by 50 percent. “Our uptime and system availability are better than ever,” Nims says.

Most important, though, is that AWS has provided Capital One the flexibility, capacity, and microservices architecture it needs to create at scale the experiences that its customers want. One of these customer-centric innovations is Eno, the Capital One intelligent assistant that the company developed using Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, and other AWS services. Eno’s proactive insights help customers keep their money safe, using serverless streaming architecture to conduct analyses in real time that identify unusual charges on an account. In addition, the Capital One mobile app combines the power of machine learning with a cloud-based, multiregion infrastructure. The app is built using a broad range of AWS services, including Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), and it helps customers stay connected to their accounts. Another example of a customer experience is Capital One Shopping—a free tool that helps shoppers save money—which was created using modern service architecture, data streaming, and cloud technology, including Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), and Amazon RDS. Capital One Shopping automates the work shoppers are already doing to find lower prices by automatically applying coupon codes at checkout and sending alerts on price drops. “We’re now well positioned to serve customers during the 2020 holiday, which is expected to be the biggest online holiday shopping cycle in history,” Nims says.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Capital One’s shift to a cloud-first approach was a critical factor for its workforce to remain connected, productive, and focused on supporting customers. With its AWS infrastructure, the bank was able to actively monitor performance and dynamically scale resources based on need. Customers could continue using their digital banking tools, like the Capital One mobile app and website, and were able to check account balances, make payments, view transactions, find an ATM, and more. In addition, Capital One was able to quickly shift its associates from working in the office to working from home—helping to keep everyone safe, connected, and productive. Technology team members could control and monitor the company’s AWS infrastructure through APIs from anywhere without having to worry about capacity constraints or data center maintenance. Also working from home were thousands of contact center agents who could continue supporting customers remotely using Amazon Connect.

Capital One’s digital transformation began with the ambition to become a modern technology company that could develop its own applications and lead the banking industry in innovating for customers. Along the way, though, the company completely reinvented itself—its talent, culture, operations, and technology infrastructure. As a result, its cloud migration became a foundation for building the bank of the future, one that could quickly and continuously innovate to meet changing customer needs and preferences.

“Capital One today is an entirely different company from what it was 8 years ago,” says Nims. “We can now build new experiences that are powered by more data and available in real time with algorithms and artificial intelligence.”

Moreover, Capital One has proven that a Fortune 100 company in a highly regulated industry can make the leap from legacy, on-premises data centers to modern architectures in the cloud. The key to doing so, for Capital One, was approaching the move holistically. It not only went all in on migrating to AWS—it also reimagined its entire organization, hiring and developing a diverse group of data scientists, developers, and experts in human-centered design who could work together to transform Capital One into a pioneering technology company.

“We’ve unleashed the power of our 50,000 associates and unlocked innovative, new capabilities for our customers,” Nims says. “We can’t wait for what’s possible next on AWS.”