Quick answer: Every global company has an Axis Mundi, the platform that holds the regional operation together. When it works, nobody notices. When it doesn’t, everything downstream stalls. We just wrapped a project for a global beverage company (30,000+ employees, a name you’d recognize) whose Axis Mundi was an Adobe AEM digital-asset-management platform: regional marketing depended on it daily, internal engineering coverage was essentially zero, and a migration was circling overhead. The uncomfortable question for every leader: which of your critical systems is one resignation away from unmaintained?
The obvious move: write a migration script
Fast, cheap, done. Also disposable – the next regional rollout starts from scratch.
The contrarian move we took: build a pipeline, not a script
We moved 10,000+ digital assets through an AWS S3 pipeline in two months with 100% metadata integrity, but the real deliverable was the pipeline itself: market-agnostic and reusable for every future rollout. A one-off effort became a repeatable capability. The next market migration rebuilds nothing.
The lesson nobody prints in the docs: APIs lie, templates don’t
Mid-migration, the client’s own APIs kept returning incorrect data. Instead of chasing the API team for weeks, we treated the source templates as the authoritative record, and that "template-as-truth" call quietly saved the timeline. Governance is local; the platform is one. We adapted workflows to how each region actually operates, not how the documentation assumes they do. That’s the difference between modernization that lasts and a script you’ll rewrite next quarter.
FAQ
Adapted from a LinkedIn post by Alena Busko, CMO at Azati – read the original.
