NAB extends AWS cloud agreement

NAB has extended an arrangement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for core business applications.

The deal comes as NAB reveals it has shifted roughly 85 percent of its workloads into a public multi-cloud environment.

Speaking during the AWS financial services symposium in Sydney, NAB CIO for business and private bank Darren Abbruzzese said it was only a matter of time before the bank exited its on-premises infrastructure entirely.

"We have been very purposeful [in the migration process]," he said. "We are at about 85 percent [of workloads migrated] at the moment. 

“It is inevitable that at some stage, we will get out of our data centres. When that day comes - I’m not quite sure when that is - we will be running on public cloud infrastructure."

NAB would not disclose the length of the new AWS contract when contacted by iTnews.

The bank has been working with AWS since 2013 but signed an agreement with the public cloud provider in 2022 to accelerate its cloud transformation.

Since starting its cloud migration, NAB has experienced a 70 percent reduction in downtime from major incidents, according to Abbruzzese.

"We continue to drive that number down year-on-year," he said.

NAB's renewed agreement comes as it embarks on a series of generative AI use cases with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q, with more than 1000 NAB engineers now working on the latter.

In addition, NAB digital channels, including merchant and business banking facility NAB Connect and Simple Home Loans have all been migrated to AWS’ infrastructure.

Last year, NAB completed the rollout of its cloud contact centre service Amazon Connect.

As of now, the bank has certified more than 3360 NAB engineers to work with AWS cloud.

Less plumbing and wiring 

According to Abbruzzese, NAB has also been investing in “how engineers leverage the cloud and its capabilities", which has resulted in a rethink of the teams' operations.

“We have invested heavily into an engineering framework as a single pipeline that we share across all our engineering squads," he said.

“It takes away the plumbing and the DevOps work that engineering squads can often get caught up in, and that allows them to spend more time on the delivery.

“They can focus more time on features and less time on wiring things together."