NAB to migrate 35 percent of IT apps to cloud

NAB is planning to re-home 35 percent of its IT application portfolio in the cloud within the next three to five years.

The big four bank this morning finally put targets on a cloud-first strategy it has slowly outlined over the course of the past year.

The disclosure was made in NAB's full year results that saw the bank's cash profit drop 14.2%  to $5.7 billion on the back of costs associated with giving money back to customers in the wake of the Banking Royal Commission and job cuts.

NAB last year told investors it intended to cull 6000 jobs but then hire around 2000 technology as part of a transformation to shift the institution to a digital footing.

On Thursday the bank made a point of putting progress along that transformation on display.

In addition to re-platforming one third of its total IT applications, NAB is also hoping to shut down a further 15 and 20 percent of IT applications that it runs.

So far, the bank has managed to put 70 production applications into the cloud. Of that number, 58 were transitioned in FY18, “including 30 in the last 50 days” of the fiscal year, NAB said, pointing to a recent, rapid acceleration in its internal capability.

That acceleration is likely to be the result of the company’s ‘cloud guild’ training taking hold; the bank is now consistently offering training in both the AWS and Azure ecosystems to around 3000 internal staff.

NAB’s overall goals - and hit rate - had not previously been disclosed before today.

So far, NAB has managed to put three percent of its app portfolio - 70 apps in total - into the cloud, or more specifically “externally managed cloud services”.

In addition, five percent of all IT applications, or 120 in total, have been culled.

That would put its total IT application portfolio at around 2400 applications.

By the end of the massive project, about 840 will have been rehomed to run in the cloud, sizing the opportunity presently in front of major players like AWS and Microsoft in trying to secure NAB’s workloads.

Microsoft has only recently muscled into the cloud guild, and spent last week establishing its credentials to win some of the work on offer. Until now, it has been almost exclusively AWS-focused.

NAB is also known to be building an internal platform based on open hardware and software.

It’s still not clear just how many applications and workloads will run on this, though today’s numbers show up to 45 percent of applications will still need to live somewhere other than public cloud.

NAB said that migrating applications to the cloud could cut out up to 60 percent of their individual running costs.

So far, "CRM, universal workflow, enterprise data lake, machine learning platform, and other new digital services" had been implemented on public cloud, the bank said.