NAB to move some core banking systems to Amazon’s cloud

Builds three strategic platforms on AWS

Credit: Dreamstime

NAB aims to move more than 300 applications, including some core banking systems, to Amazon Web Services by the end of next year.

AWS announced overnight that NAB had selected it as the bank’s “long term strategic cloud provider” as part of a cloud-first strategy.

The bank’s CEO, Andrew Thorburn, told a full year results briefing earlier this month that cloud “has become a major opportunity to drive lower cost, lower risk and faster speed”.

During the 12 months to the end of September, NAB migrated 3 per cent of its applications to cloud services. The bank moved around 70 applications to the cloud during the course of the year.

Moving an application to the cloud can cut costs by up to 60 per cent, according to NAB.

Earlier this year NAB detailed a new training initiative dubbed ‘NAB Cloud Guild’. The program had an initial focus on Amazon Web Services, but it now also includes Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, which NAB also employs.

Some 3000 of the bank’s employees have participated in NAB Cloud Guild.

One of NAB’s major AWS-based initiatives has been a service called NAB Discovery Cloud, which chief technology and operations officer, Patrick Wright, earlier this year told Computerworld would be the foundation of a data lake for the bank.

“It will be the foundational element that will feed our machine learning ecosystem, it will be the foundational element that will feed our analytics ecosystem, it will be the foundational element that feeds our marketing ecosystem,” Wright said.

“The reality is, data is king and this is the beginnings of a journey for us that will be many years in the making — to move from a traditional, old school, five-years-ago sort of design, into a modern design that allows us to be far more flexible and scale more rapidly.”

AWS said the platform is based on S3, Redshift, Athena, and enables the bank to “ingest, analyze, and take action on customer preferences gleaned from petabytes of satisfaction data in minutes rather than months”

In addition to Discovery Cloud, the bank is building two other major platforms using AWS’s services: NAB Services Cloud and NAB Data Hub. The bank is also eyeing Amazon Connect as a contact centre platform.

“This is just the beginning of our journey, and we’re eager to innovate using AWS in ways that were not possible with our on-premises infrastructure,” said NAB executive general manager, business enabling technology, Yuri Misnik.

“For instance, the NAB Data Hub which is a data lake we’re building on AWS, is a first and foundational element of our data strategy. It will feed our new machine learning ecosystem, which we are creating using AWS’s industry-leading technologies.”

Earlier this year the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority released new guidance on the use of cloud services by the entities it regulates.

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Tags cloud computingNABbanksAmazon Web Services (AWS)

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