EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Group 1001 is a leading financial services organization supporting next-generation insurance businesses across life and annuity, health, property and casualty, and specialty insurance. Facing rising costs, security concerns, and an expiring data center lease, Group 1001 partnered with CleanSlate to deliver AWS cloud migration services that would reduce risk, address years of technical debt, and modernize its infrastructure without disrupting business operations.

With a short timeline, CleanSlate was able to quickly jump in and implement a “Lift & Shift” program to migrate approximately 47 applications and 230 servers from their third-party data center to AWS cloud in less than 100 days. CleanSlate set up a migration factory team that worked with Group 1001 to document their environment using C4 notation. This helped them transparently copy and migrate all their applications and data using proprietary AWS technology. The goal was to complete the migration so seamlessly that it was almost unnoticeable to their 1,500 users as well as the business community.

CleanSlate successfully implemented the migration through Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud (a.k.a. The Bubble). This allowed for a logically isolated virtual network within the AWS cloud. With complete control over IP address ranges, subnets and security settings, CleanSlate essentially created a “bubble” of Group 1001’s own private network within the larger AWS cloud. Once the “Lift & Shift” migration took place, CleanSlate immediately transitioned to a “Transform in Place” phase to make all the necessary security, operational and compliance improvements.

The project was a huge success and CleanSlate met and exceeded Group 1001’s expectations by completing the project in record time with minimal business disruption. The company was also able to save millions of dollars in operational costs, increase efficiencies and improve security measures, which was an invaluable benefit to the organization. CleanSlate helped position Group 1001 to continue their massive growth trajectory and remain competitive in the industry both now and in the years to come.

THE BURNING PLATFORM

Group 1001’s core data platform was built on a legacy system that was hosted by a third party data center, which was costly, inefficient and left them vulnerable to security threats. In addition, the legacy platform was over 10 years old and was no longer able to keep up with Group 1001’s growing business needs. In fact, the company had experienced a security breach, which further accelerated their desire to make a change. If Group 1001 wanted to renew the contract with their existing provider, it would mean higher costs and overspending on the technology budget that was allotted for the following year.

While Group 1001 was experiencing massive growth, every time they needed to scale their infrastructure to meet the growing demands, it cost them. It was apparent that their current platform couldn’t scale with them nor could it meet their growing needs. The company had decided on a deadline to divest all workloads and infrastructure from their third party data center by the end of October 2024. This gave CleanSlate roughly six weeks to complete the entire migration project. CleanSlate rose to the challenge, as this need was driven by Group 1001’s budgetary needs and desire to modernize their architecture.

Migrating to the AWS Cloud was the perfect solution for Group 1001’s goals of moving to the cloud, modernizing their architecture, increasing efficiencies, cutting costs, improving security and much more.

MAJOR CHALLENGES & PROBLEMS TO SOLVE

● The lease with Group 1001’s third party data center vendor expired at the end of October 2024, with an extension significantly higher in cost, jeopardizing the remaining 2024 and projected 2025 budget for technology spend

● Multiple instances of ransomware attacks and other security breaches due to insufficient vendor controls and lack of internal security infrastructure

● Limited monitoring capabilities, which prevented proactive threat detection and response

● Difficulty in scaling the infrastructure to accommodate new portfolio companies, slowing down acquisition integration

● Lack of standardized processes across portfolio companies, leading to inefficiencies and duplicated efforts

SOLUTIONS

Group 1001’s platform consisted of a legacy infrastructure with outdated systems, which led to high maintenance costs and limited flexibility. These challenges made it difficult for the organization to adapt to modern technology and underscored the need for AWS cloud migration services that could support long-term scalability and agility.

CleanSlate assembled a high-performing team of twelve consultants with deep experience delivering AWS cloud migration services for complex enterprise environments. The team brought proven expertise across architecture, engineering, testing, and deployment. During the engagement, they developed and validated repeatable migration patterns, led the data center migration to AWS, and implemented Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) automation using DevOps best practices.

By partnering with CleanSlate, Group 1001 leveraged a combination of AWS cloud migration services, SD-WAN, and modern networking strategies to replace outdated systems with a scalable, cloud-native infrastructure. SD-WAN enabled Group 1001 to abstract networking complexity and deploy a cost-effective solution using ISP connections to securely connect locations across multiple deployment environments. This new AWS-based architecture significantly reduced on-premises maintenance requirements, lowered costs, and increased organizational agility.

The next challenge Group 1001 faced was a heavy reliance on external vendors for critical functions such as NOC, SOC, and infrastructure management. Limited oversight resulted in inconsistent performance and increased security risk across the environment.

CleanSlate addressed these challenges by helping Group 1001 bring essential functions—including NOC, SOC, server and database administration, and service desk operations—back in-house. As part of its AWS cloud migration services, CleanSlate also helped establish internal governance and technology management teams to improve oversight, enforce standards, and monitor ongoing performance.

Group 1001 had also experienced multiple ransomware incidents and security breaches due to fragmented security tooling and insufficient vendor controls. Limited visibility and monitoring capabilities made it difficult to detect threats proactively or respond quickly.

Through its AWS cloud migration services, CleanSlate strengthened Group 1001’s security posture by implementing Monitoring as Code to enable real-time threat detection and response through a standardized, scalable framework. CleanSlate also introduced internal SOC capabilities, reduced third-party dependency, and implemented modern firewalls with stateful inspection, hardened Infrastructure-as-Code landing zones, and micro-segmentation to further enhance security.

Finally, Group 1001 struggled to scale infrastructure quickly enough to support new portfolio company acquisitions. The lack of standardized architectures and deployment processes created inefficiencies and slowed integration timelines.

CleanSlate resolved this challenge by implementing a mature CI/CD build and test process using GitLab and Infrastructure-as-Code as part of its AWS cloud migration services. This enabled consistent, automated deployments across portfolio companies and provided a standardized foundation for rapid scaling and accelerated acquisition integration.

With CleanSlate as a strategic partner, Group 1001 is now positioned to meet evolving business demands, support continued growth, and maintain a competitive edge—backed by secure, scalable, and well-governed AWS cloud migration services.

SUCCESS METRICS

The Group 1001 + CleanSlate partnership delivered tremendous value through a customized data migration with AWS. CleanSlate was able to design and build a solution that creates value, resulting in improved business growth, customer retention and operational efficiencies. A few key outcomes from the partnership included:

● Customized a program to “Lift & Shift” the Group 1001 application portfolio housed in a third party data center to AWS cloud in less than 100 days

● Reduced annual operating costs by millions of dollars by eliminating colocation server costs, third party vendor expenses and costly MPLS lines and equipment

● Gained efficiencies by reducing provisioning time for basic new servers from 6-8 weeks to 1 hour (via IaC)

● Improved problem detection time from days to almost real-time, due to new observability plan by insourced NOC

● Improved resource optimization by increasing or decreasing allocation of CPU, Memory or Disk went from 2+ months to overnight

👤 Artie Sluka, Technical Manager
Published: March 18, 2025