Allied Irish Bank (AIB) has enlisted Hitachi to overhaul its entire IT storage environment as part of a wider effort to become a more digitally-focused operation.
Having taken a pasting during the economic crisis and facing customer demand for online and mobile services, this year AIB has embarked on a mission to transform itself into a cutting-edge, digitally-led bank.
In April it opened a high-tech concept branch in Dublin called 'The Lab', specifically designed to showcase digital services and help customers come to grips with them.
COO Anne Boden recently told a conference in London how AIB has been adopting a start-up culture in a bid to get new services - such as mortgage processing apps - to market in weeks rather than years.
To underpin the new focus on digital, AIB has partnered with Hitachi Data Systems to simplify its existing multivendor storage estate. It has consolidated more than 14 data storage arrays into just four using Hitachi virtual storage platform.
The bank has also adopted Hitachi NAS platform to manage increasing data growth, the vendor's content platform to scale business-critical information, and its command suite technologies to unify management across the entire piece.
A dashboard interface is extended beyond the IT team to the different lines of business across the entire bank, cutting bottlenecks and slashing the time required to resolve issues from days to minutes.
Padraic Hamrock, head, infrastructure and technology operations, AIB, says: "Our partnership with Hitachi Data Systems is in alignment with our commitment to build AIB into a technology-led bank delivering consistent, flexible and cost effective services to our businesses and customers."