The Bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and Its Move to the Cloud

Although Chapter 11 affords reorganization and protection from debtors, declaring bankruptcy is the end of the story for many businesses. However when it's the largest Chapter 11 in history, as was the case when the financial services corporation Lehman Brothers declared bankrupcy in 2008, "the end" is a story in itself. And as a story in CIO Magazine chronicles, it's a story that involves the company winding down its vast IT infrastructure - and moving to the cloud.

As part of the bankruptcy process involved turning Lehman Brothers' remaining assets into cash for the company's creditors, minimizing costs and maximizing efficiency was important. Lehman Brothers' CTO James Johnson had to "find a solution to support the current business and together support the wind-down."

Johnson needed a way to scale down certain aspects of IT operations during scaling up others - all together, clearly, as avoiding any major capital investment on the bankrupt firm. "It wasn't like I was looking for cloud computing," Johnson tells CIO Magazine. However as he evaluated his options, "cloud matched specifically what we wanted to do."

Before its Chapter 11, Lehman Brothers had a huge IT operation, the norm for most Wall Street companies. It deployed 2,700 software applications running on 27,000 servers. It supported over 100,000 different devices, ranging from smartphones to traders' terminals. And Johnson was tasked with taking all of that apart during simultaneously, clearly, supporting all of it.