BT Group struck a five-year agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to transform its legacy infrastructure and internal applications towards a new cloud-first approach, part of a wider programme to deliver £2 billion in savings.

The operator’s digital unit stated it made AWS its preferred cloud provider and the effort was designed to accelerate its plans to build a new suite of digital products, in addition to reducing costs in IT maintenance.

BT Digital’s agreement forms one element of a broader modernisation programme running until the end of fiscal 2024 (the year to end-March 2024) aiming to deliver £2 billion in gross annualised savings, as the company retires legacy applications, associated infrastructure and data centres.

It explained the AWS agreement represented a dramatic simplification of its current IT properties, and was designed to be cloud-native, microservices-based and fully modular. BT added the move will boost its ability to swiftly respond to customers’ needs in areas including security, privacy and compliance.

BT Digital COO Thomas Ducke believes the company has a big opportunity to modernise its infrastructure and the AWS agreement will help to accelerate the whole group.

Over the five-year period, BT added it will make investments and use AWS technology, with focus on application workloads.