About the project
FirstBank, one of Nigeria’s largest and most established financial institutions, embarked on a multi-phase cloud transformation journey to modernize its core banking systems, improve operational agility, and strengthen its security posture. I serve as the Technical Program Manager overseeing this complex and high-impact migration, ensuring alignment with both business goals and regulatory standards.
My Responsibilities
- Cloud Strategy Development: Led the creation of a phased migration roadmap tailored to FirstBank’s enterprise ecosystem, incorporating AWS best practices, regulatory compliance, and scalability targets.
- Program Management: Coordinated multiple technical workstreams—security, networking, application modernization, and cloud governance—across internal teams and external vendors.
- Data Security & Compliance: Oversaw implementation of robust cloud security controls, data encryption, and IAM policies aligned with CBN and NDPR standards.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Worked closely with executive sponsors, risk & compliance units, and engineering leads to drive adoption and ensure cross-functional alignment.
- Cloud Skills Enablement: Designed and facilitated upskilling programs for over 50 technical staff to support long-term cloud operations.
Ongoing Phases & Milestones
- ✅ Phase 1 (Completed): Cloud readiness assessment, strategy definition, and pilot migrations of non-core workloads.
- 🚧 Phase 2 (In Progress): Migration of production applications and optimization of existing workloads, including implementation of CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code.
- 🔜 Phase 3 (Planned): Full modernization of legacy banking applications, integration of advanced analytics, and development of a bank-wide cloud center of excellence (CCoE).
Impact (To Date)
- 15% reduction in infrastructure overhead via rightsizing and early workload optimization.
- Improved security posture, including 100% encryption of customer data in transit and at rest.
- Increased deployment speed by 4x for migrated applications through automated pipelines.
- Laid the foundation for innovation, with teams now exploring AI/ML and data lake architectures for future banking services.