With Moab, the bank is consolidating and eliminating redundant and underutilized hardware, driving greater usage of commoditized middleware platforms and increasing efficiency and savings through power reduction and optimization. As a result, the bank is poised to deliver infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) based on application workloads, providing customers with superior service and projected savings to the bank of $1 billion in traditional IT costs.

A key component within the bank's new cloud architecture is Moab Adaptive Computing Suite, relied on for its policy-based cloud intelligence engine to create an agile, automated and adaptive cloud environment that responds faster to business requests and automates across IT processes. Moab Adaptive Computing Suite will manage vital tasks such as flagging resource conflicts, recommending the best course of action to resolve issues and radically reducing the time required to acquire, deliver and optimize fully functional compute platforms and services that are responsive to dynamic business conditions.

"Organizations that want to leverage cloud computing to its maximum potential—agility, cost savings and responsiveness to the constantly changing needs of business—must invest in service governors," says Donna Scott, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Research. "Service governors are the critical component in the real-time infrastructure, acting as the brain to carry out optimization actions. They smarten up cloud infrastructures and take action based on SLAs, policies and application demand—allowing organizations to evolve self-service cloud projects into rich, self-optimizing, elastic clouds and achieve rapid, tangible benefits."

Bank executives are making this strategic leap into the cloud to address the complexity and fragmentation in their global enterprise data centers that was a result of a multi-year acquisition spree. This cloud infrastructure project takes advantage of the best practices that cloud computing has established—namely agility, risk mitigation, cost savings and dynamic optimization. Given its expansive global scope, the bank is expected to set new industry standards for business agility, productivity and IT efficiency.

"There is a fundamental shift taking place in the market today in cloud computing. We're seeing enterprises become increasingly comfortable with shared, dynamic cloud environments and feeling confident in looking to the cloud to improve their IT economics and operations," said Michael Jackson, COO and president of Adaptive Computing. "Adaptive Computing is in the right position to help these enterprises, from financial institutions to telecommunications and e-commerce organizations, deliver on the promise of the cloud, by providing the intelligent automation software that spurs cost-savings, optimization and business responsiveness within cloud infrastructures. We are thrilled to be a part of such an expansive deployment and look forward to watching the bank as the project continues to unfold, generate savings and enable a strategic business advantage."