Cloud case study: Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to shift critical workloads into multi-cloud environment
Bendigo and Adelaide Bank might only just be over a year into its cloud transformation journey, but the bank is now readying to move its critical workloads into the cloud over the next six months.
"We've sort of said, we've got enough non-material workloads now to say, we know how it works, we know our risks, and control frameworks are good; let's start moving the important ones," Andrew Cresp, CIO of Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, told ZDNet.
Cresp said some of those "important" workloads that would be moved include the bank's New Payments Platform as well as its lending and card capabilities.
"We are focusing now on the workloads at Bendigo where our customers will have interactions with them," he said. "We get to use that availability, that speed, so we can respond more quickly to our customers."
Fundamental to changing the organisation's approach has been its multi-cloud strategy, where it leverages both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud environments, depending on the application.
"We actually think some of the cloud providers are better at different things," Cresp said.
"We think Google, or some analytics within Google, are pretty good at the innovation stuff, so what we call the front and the back at the engagement level on the data and analytics. We think AWS are really strong in the system of record; they're a really mature organisation in helping us navigate and make sure that our risks and controls are in place.
"We have strategically said that's how we're going to play out our cloud [strategy], but with the optionality to say this isn't working we can move and there are opportunities to do that."
He believes having choice around cloud providers is necessary to minimise any potential risks.
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"From a supplier risk perspective, if we had a cloud provider or an application provider that started being non-commercial for us or non-performant then having the ability to move and give ourselves the flexibility of moving, I think is a really critical thing … it is important from our business perspective to manage that risk, but also from a cost perspective as well," Cresp said.
"You want to be in a position to say if we want to, we can, and that's really important."
Another vital piece underpinning the speeding up at which the bank now operates, according to Cresp, has been the adoption of MongoDB's cloud database service, MongoDB Atlas.
"For us to move at cloud speed, we needed databases that can move quickly to and to iterate at the speeds we want the cloud and the cloud experience to work with," he said.
"Traditionally, in a normal database, as your developing applications, you have these database administrators that have to go through developing relational joins … and in Mongo they have basically taken that out."
He added that working with Mongo has meant cloud portability is possible between its multiple cloud providers.
"We're using AWS and Google, and Mongo works really effectively in something we call portability between clouds. That's something that's been really, really good for us in working through that. It helps us with our API development ... From a cost perspective, it's about 50% less what we're doing previously," Cresp said.