How CSL Used AWS Agentic AI to Exit 29 Data Centers and Modernize 5,000 Servers
CSL is a global biotechnology company with 29,000 employees producing life-saving medicines across hemophilia, immunology, vaccines, and nephrology therapies in more than 100 countries. Facing 5,000 VMware servers and 1,000+ applications across 29 data centers accumulated through multiple acquisitions, CSL launched a Technology Modernization Program using AWS. By deploying AWS Transform for VMware — an agentic AI tool for migration wave planning — the company reduced application discovery from hours to minutes and is on track to exit two major data centers by December 2025.
Impact
Minutes
Application discovery time
5,000
VMware servers being migrated
1,000+
Applications documented for migration
2
Data centers scheduled to close
Challenge
5,000 VMware servers across 29 data centers from multiple acquisitions created a fragmented, unscalable infrastructure where traditional migration planning took one month to plan just 172 servers and one to two hours per application discovery.
Solution
CSL deployed AWS Transform for VMware to automate dependency mapping and migration wave planning, Amazon Q Business to index 17,000+ pages of documentation for rapid application discovery, and AWS cloud infrastructure as the Digital Core foundation.
Tools & Technologies
Amazon Q BusinessWhat Leaders Say
“We took a step back and decided how we wanted to reinvent CSL. Our goal was to create a robust environment that fosters innovation while keeping things simple, cost-effective, and productive.”
“We wanted to foster seamless collaboration, shared ownership, and to enable teams to operate as one. We wanted to make data more accessible and actionable to help transform our talent.”
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Full Story
CSL has been saving lives since 1916. Today, the company’s three business units — CSL Behring, CSL Seqirus, and CSL Vifor — provide therapies to patients in over 100 countries, treating conditions that most pharmaceutical companies won’t touch. That mission demands infrastructure that is resilient, secure, and able to evolve as fast as the science.
The infrastructure CSL actually had in 2024 was the opposite. Multiple acquisitions had left the company with 5,000 VMware servers spread across 29 data centers, operating on disparate technology stacks with mixed licensing structures and recurring scalability bottlenecks. Planning the migration of even a small batch of servers took weeks of manual effort. Initial analysis showed it would take one month to plan the migration of just 172 servers using traditional methods, with each application discovery requiring one to two hours of manual work.
CSL chose AWS as the foundation for its “Digital Core” — a branded, secure cloud landing zone covering infrastructure, data analytics, and AI readiness. To break the logjam on migration planning, the team used AWS Transform for VMware, which deploys specialized agents to analyze VMware environments, map dependencies, convert network configurations, and generate migration waves automatically.
With agentic AI handling wave planning, CSL restructured the work: Amazon Q Business indexed over 17,000 pages of infrastructure documentation spanning 1,000+ applications, reducing application discovery from one-to-two hours each to minutes. AWS Transform then grouped applications into dependency-aware migration waves, ensuring continuous uptime during cutovers. Weeks of manual effort were compressed into automated analysis.
By December 2025, CSL is on track to close two major data centers. The cloud platform also enables Deviation AI, an analytics application that uses AI to detect outliers in clinical trial outcomes for faster protocol adjustments — directly connecting infrastructure modernization to accelerated drug development. Project Unify will consolidate three fragmented SAP ERP instances into a single AWS-hosted S/4HANA environment, delivering “One CSL” data governance across the enterprise.