National Australia Bank has signed a five-year deal with Microsoft to co-design, develop and invest in the bank's multi-cloud strategy, porting 1000 of its 2600 apps to Azure as the primary cloud.
Under the agreement, NAB and Microsoft will share development costs and resourcing investment to architect a multi-cloud ecosystem that will host 1000 of the banks’ applications on Microsoft Azure as the primary cloud, while ensuring the same applications can be moved to or run across a secondary cloud if necessary.
NAB group executive technology and enterprise operations, Patrick Wright says the bank has already moved more than 800 applications to public cloud providers, primarily across Amazon Web Services. NAB’s proportion of apps on public cloud will move from one third, to around 80 per cent by 2023 he adds.
“The investment we’ve made in technology to date has built a strong, cloud-first foundation that’s enabled colleagues to execute better and deliver much better experiences for our customers," he says. “Together, we will improve the resilience of NAB and BNZ banking services and reduce development timelines for system changes and improvements, from six weeks to as little as two days."
As part of the deal, Microsoft will also train 5000 NAB and BNZ technologists under the bank's Cloud Guild programme, ensuring staff are equipped with the skills to maximise the investment in the technology.