Global HVAC and Refrigeration Leader Accelerates Digital Transformation on AWS, Reduces Infrastructure Costs by 45–50%
Carrier Global, a global provider of heating, ventilation, air conditioning, refrigeration, fire, and security solutions, reduced infrastructure costs and enabled rapid innovation by migrating from on-premises data centers to Amazon Web Services.
Value Results Summary
After its 2020 separation from United Technologies Corporation, Carrier Global faced a critical opportunity to modernize. The company was operating over 6,000 application servers, with 4,000 spread across on-premises data centers worldwide. This legacy architecture was slow, expensive, and difficult to scale. With a one-year service agreement window following the divestiture, Carrier resolved to pursue true digital transformation rather than simply migrating to the cloud. Executive leadership chose Amazon Web Services for its 150+ services, high resiliency, and continuous innovation. Starting in January 2020, Carrier's team designed customized, fully automated solutions across eight global regions—Germany, Ireland, Hong Kong, Singapore, North America, and China—with workload migration beginning in June 2020.
Carrier implemented Amazon AppStream 2.0 to replace its server farms and handle critical workloads including payroll processing, eliminating concerns about accumulating technical debt. The company deployed Amazon Aurora and Amazon Relational Database Service to enable engineers worldwide to self-provision infrastructure in 30 minutes without submitting requests—previously a 35-day process. By prioritizing modernization over lift-and-shift migration, Carrier rebuilt many workloads from scratch, spreading product development and innovation across teams. This approach enabled the company to design connected homes, advance cold chain management, and plan vaccine distribution solutions. The migration also delivered significant security benefits through AWS's economy of scale and modernized technologies with stronger security profiles.
To date, Carrier has remediated roughly 1,300 servers, migrating most to AWS while retiring over 400 servers worth of workloads through the elasticity AWS provides. The company has reduced infrastructure costs by 45–50% and decreased total infrastructure by 20%, generating millions in direct savings. Employee morale improved through self-service capabilities and expanded opportunities for upskilling and innovation. Real-time data collection from connected devices will enable machine learning algorithms to identify customer patterns, predict problems before they occur, and improve product offerings. One-third into its three-year modernization plan, Carrier continues consolidating critical systems to AWS while achieving the resiliency, high availability, and competitive advantages that are more difficult and expensive to achieve on-premises.
