Santander's Move to Cloud: How One of the World's Largest Banks Rearchitected Its Data Foundation

Enterprise data migrations are often described in terms of technology. Santander's 'Move to Cloud' program was a test of institutional will. Moving 16 petabytes from Cloudera and ScyllaDB environments to a modern, secure, and scalable cloud architecture required coordinating across data engineering, infrastructure, architecture, and centralized ingestion — engaging more than 100 organizational areas. The results are measurable and material: $40 million in projected cost avoidance over five years, a 38% reduction in technology vulnerabilities (216,000 eliminated), and a modern data foundation that now drives speed, resilience, and AI-readiness for one of the world's largest financial institutions. In this session, Santander's CDO Laila Kurati and Head of Data Engineering and Platform Technology Rodrigo Ohira share what it truly takes to execute a transformation of this magnitude — the governance model, the stakeholder alignment, and the technology decisions that positioned Santander to treat data as a driver of competitive advantage rather than operational cost. For CIOs and CDOs overseeing large-scale migrations, this is the session to benchmark against.