NAB moves online business banking platform to the cloud

By Edil Corneille

National Australia Bank (NAB), one of the big 4 Australian banks, has today announced the successful migration of NAB Connect to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The bank has mentioned that this has made it the first major Australian bank to move its business banking platform to the cloud.

NAB Executive Enterprise Technology, Steve Day says AWS service Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides secure and scalable compute capacity reducing operational risk and cost while supporting platform resilience.

“The migration to cloud has already benefited customers from fewer platform interruptions, allowing us to deliver a seamless customer experience through fluctuations in demand. For example, we supported a 42 per cent increase in usage due to EOFY transactions.

“Our customers are busy running their businesses, and want their online banking experience to be reliable, simple and secure. This migration allows us to develop new services to help our business customers drive operational efficiencies, without disrupting their day-to-day activities,” Mr Day said.

“AWS gives us flexible infrastructure that can be modified securely in minutes as opposed to days and weeks. Our infrastructure maintenance times have reduced by 60 per cent, giving our engineers more capacity to innovate and test new services to better serve customer needs.”

AWS Director of Enterprise in Australia and New Zealand, Karl Durrance, said, “We have been working with NAB since 2013 and are pleased to support them as they take another step forward in their cloud transformation journey. As technology continues to transform the way Australians bank, we look forward to helping NAB to leverage the flexibility, security, and scalability of AWS to grow their platform and better connect with their customers by delivering seamless, personalised banking solutions.”

Leveraging AWS, the NAB Connect platform will benefit from enhanced fraud detection by using Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorised behaviour on NAB’s account and workloads. The introduction of AWS Auto Scaling monitors the application and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady and predictable performance.