NAB re-platforms online business banking to AWS

NAB has migrated its merchant and business banking facility, NAB Connect, to run on AWS cloud, which it says should increase the resilience and reliability of the platform.

Enterprise technology executive Steve Day said in a statement that running NAB Connect on AWS EC2 instances “provides secure and scalable compute capacity reducing operational risk and cost, while supporting platform resilience”.

It will also use auto scaling to automatically adjust capacity to meet user demand.

“The migration to cloud has already benefited customers from fewer platform interruptions, allowing us to deliver a seamless customer experience through fluctuations in demand,” Day said.

“For example, we supported a 42 percent increase in usage due to EOFY [end of financial year] 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.”

Day said the move to cloud-based hosting would allow NAB Connect to be “modified securely in minutes as opposed to days and weeks.” 

NAB Connect currently serves around 70,000 business customers across Australia, with $141 billion of payments processed on the platform in August.

NAB said the migration of NAB Connect to AWS made it “the first major Australian bank to move its business banking platform to the cloud.”

The bank added that NAB Connect would also “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.”

NAB Connect was hit by outages in both January and February this year.