How Cornerstone Transformed Its Global Infrastructure

This article describes how Cornerstone OnDemand migrated its entire global infrastructure from six legacy data centers to AWS across 11 regions, serving 140 million users with minimal disruption.

• Migrated 1,500+ servers, 35,000 databases, 4 petabytes of data, and 8 billion files using AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) 2.0
• Built custom "Teleporter" automation platform to handle 35,000 database migrations with auto-recovery and full audit trails
• Achieved per-region migration time reduction from 8 weeks to under 2 weeks through iterative learning and continuous improvement
• Implemented full observability stack before go-live to reduce mean-time-to-detect from 12 minutes to under 2 minutes
• Optimized compute costs 30–40% through right-sizing and Reserved Instances based on observed usage patterns
• Maintained 99.9%+ availability throughout migration with minimal-to-zero customer impact across 7,000+ enterprise customers
• Positioned platform for AI/ML innovation using Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, and agentic AI capabilities

Cornerstone's five-year migration demonstrates that enterprise-scale cloud transformation is achievable through automation, sequenced learning, staged observability, and cost optimization discipline.