NAB to migrate over 300 apps onto AWS by end of 2019

The National Australia Bank (NAB) has unveiled plans to migrate more than 300 applications, including core banking systems, to Amazon Web Services (AWS) by the end of 2019.

Unveiled amid re:Invent 2018 in Las Vegas, the banking giant will align to a “cloud-first” strategy going forward, leveraging AWS for compute, storage, database and analytics capabilities.

The aim of the strategic partnership is to build new services to deliver "better financial outcomes" for NAB’s nine million customers around the globe.

“AWS’s extensive functionality is critical to NAB’s transformation, giving us far more flexibility, empowering us to move much faster, and allowing us to rapidly scale as we expand our use of cloud technologies,” said Yuri Misnik, executive general manager of technology at NAB.

“AWS understands our requirements for operating securely in the cloud, and worked with us to establish a training program that prepares our workforce with the necessary skills to enable our path to the cloud.”

For enhanced security, NAB has also deployed Amazon GuardDuty, a fully managed intelligent threat detection service that monitors account activity for malicious or unauthorised behaviour.

“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,” Misnik added.

“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.”

With over 300 AWS certifications achieved, NAB operates a cloud-enablement training program for employees locally, designed to boost skills across the vendor's core technologies.

Furthermore, NAB is building a data lake on AWS using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Athena to "ingest, analyse, and take action" on customer preferences "in minutes rather than months".

“Financial services organisations like NAB are turning to AWS for the most comprehensive set of cloud services, most secure and reliable infrastructure, greatest scale, and highest availability, allowing them to deliver new digital services from the ground up and confidently shift operations from on-premises to the cloud,” said Mike Clayville, vice president of worldwide commercial sales at AWS.

“We’re excited to expand our relationship with NAB as their strategic cloud provider as they migrate more workloads to AWS and help them realise efficiencies and benefits in areas like performance computing, security and compliance, data analytics, and machine learning.”

In addition, NAB is also developing three new strategic platforms on AWS - NAB Services Cloud, NAB Data Hub, and NAB Discovery Cloud - to allow teams to "innovate at a faster rate" alongside mining and monetising data more effectively.

Delving deeper, NAB is looking to Amazon Connect - a cloud-based contact centre service - as a platform for contact centre migration to increase customer conversations and boost customer service delivery.