How CommBank designed IT-as-a-service

CommBank’s cloud operating model is underpinned by an integration layer and an orchestration platform by vendor ServiceMesh.

Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti reported last month that CommBank used ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform to implement and enforce policies for standard operating environments, workload placement, access control, virtual machine quotas and scheduling.

Harte described ServiceMesh as “an early stage company [that] required investment, were flexible around architecture and were going to standardise the way orchestration is effectively enabled”.

While the architecture was “proprietary to ServiceMesh”, Harte said CommBank had contributed to its design, testing and deployment.

“Being one of the first movers, we had the advantage of helping direct how the architecture would work,” he said, highlighting Fujitsu, Visa and US financial services provider UBS as other ServiceMesh users.

“We knew that we could standardise on that inside [CommBank] and that other corporations would want to invest in that, and their investments would keep the software capability current and market leading.”

Integrating cloud services

In recent weeks, CommBank has distanced itself from rivals National Australia Bank (NAB) and ANZ by decrying security and regulatory concerns associated with public cloud services.

NAB has “experimented” with public cloud services for marketing campaigns but plans to retain its data in a private cloud due to data privacy concerns.

Meanwhile, ANZ is faced with the prospect of duplicating elements of its private cloud in multiple countries around the world to satisfy 32 regulators in the countries it operates in.

Harte waved off definitions of “private”, “public” and “hybrid” clouds, describing “the cloud” as “any service we can subscribe to across a network, pay on-demand at a unit price, and we can switch”.

“It’s not hard, but it’s taken Australia quite a long time to get our heads around it,” he said.

“The main barrier is a lot of infrastructure suppliers; they don’t like it, and there are some software suppliers that don’t like it quite as much. We say goodbye to them.”

According to Forrester’s Bartoletti, CommBank has essentially become a “cloud service integrator”, with the IT team defining services, specifying how they should perform, and maintaining end-to-end service management and orchestration functions.

“Vendors are now required to adjust their own commercial terms to meet the bank’s business requirements, instead of the other way around,” he said.

Bartoletti highlighted the importance of strong leadership, the early development of a holistic cloud operating model, and the definition of clear vendor roles and policy-based governance in CommBank’s move.