Moving GM Financial to AEM as a Cloud Service

The starting point

GM Financial ran a large portfolio of websites on self-hosted Adobe Experience Manager. Self-hosting meant the team owned upgrades, infrastructure, and scaling on top of building features for marketing and customers. Across 20+ sites in multiple languages, that overhead added up.

The goal

Move to AEM as a Cloud Service so Adobe handles platform updates and scaling, and the team spends its time on the sites instead of the servers. Do it without disrupting live sites serving more than 100 million pageviews a year.

What changed

• Cloud-native infrastructure scaled to support 20+ global, multilingual sites
• Modern CI/CD pipelines for every code change
• Automated testing built into the release process
• Governance standards for code quality and platform use
• CDN delivery through Akamai

Results

The platform reached a 100% uptime SLA with significant performance improvements. Code quality improved under the new pipeline and review standards.

What I'd tell a team starting this migration

• Treat it as a re-platform, not a hosting move. Code that depends on a writable repository or custom server setup has to change.
• Run Adobe's Best Practices Analyzer early to size the code work before you commit to a date.
• Get the deployment pipeline working first. Every change goes through Cloud Manager, so the pipeline sets the pace for everything else.
• Plan content and asset migration as its own workstream, with its own testing.
• Decide who owns the platform after launch. Cloud Service removes server work, not the need for a team that knows AEM.

Stack

• AEM as a Cloud Service
• Java
• HTL/Sightly
• Apache Sling
• OSGi
• CI/CD
• Akamai