Insurance giant Marsh McLennan is planning a multi-year cloud migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
As part of the agreement, Marsh McLennan has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider across its four global businesses – Marsh, Guy Carpenter, Mercer, and Oliver Wyman.
The company will migrate the majority of its global on-premises infrastructure to AWS, significantly reducing the company’s physical data center footprint. Some workloads will remain on-premises to meet the company’s data management obligations.
AWS will also help the company “enhance” its GenAI assistant, LenAI, that was developed by Marsh McLennan’s Dublin Innovation Center and currently handles around 700,000 queries weekly. LenAI was built using OpenAI and Microsoft services.
“Our clients are facing increasingly complex challenges that require agile, data-driven responses,” said Paul Beswick, Marsh McLennan’s chief information and operations officer. “With AWS and its deep experience in large-scale migrations and leading cloud capabilities, we will significantly enhance our ability to provide our clients with the power of our perspective through faster insights and more innovative solutions at the speed they need and expect.”
Tanuja Randery, vice president and managing director, Europe, Middle East & Africa at AWS, said: “Marsh McLennan is embracing the cloud to enable rapid innovation, while significantly reducing operational costs and increasing resiliency across their businesses.
“Working with AWS, Marsh McLennan will enable deeper client insights while meeting the regulatory requirements of the financial and professional services sectors. At the same time, they will be able to scale their AI innovations and accelerate time-to-market for new services.”
Beswick and Randery discussed the migration in a video published to the AWS YouTube account on Wednesday, May 12.
During that conversation, Beswick explained that the company had been debating for a while when the best time to move to the cloud was. “The critical point was finding the moment where we could adopt an approach which was primarily lift and shift, make the economics work, then push back the modernization and optimization phase until afterwards,” he said.
Beswick noted that the company has “a number of strategic data centers around the world” and the migration will take a phased approach “to manage the amount of change that has to happen at any point in time, but also to align with lease expires and manage the financial aspects of this.”
Thus far, Marsh McLennan has handled the migration from one of its data centers, and is “getting close to the end of the second,” Beswick said.
He added: “Then we move to the third, and the fourth is the big one at the end.”
Marsh McLennan subsidiary Mercer previously occupied a data center in Exeter, UK. The company is currently hiring a junior data center operator in Mexico City, Mexico, suggesting it has a facility there, too.
In the company’s 2024 Annual Report, it said: “We also use hundreds of IT vendors and software providers to maintain and secure our global information systems infrastructure. In addition, we have migrated certain data, and may increasingly migrate data, to the cloud where it is hosted by third-party providers.”
