Nedbank’s Cloud Journey And The Future Of Cloud

The overarching objectives of Nedbank’s cloud journey are to increase agility, enable scale and ensure rapid elasticity. We are leveraging cloud capabilities to tap seamlessly into global innovation and advanced technologies such as robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and Internet of Things (IoT) in an effort to digitise, delight and disrupt the financial services industry and realise our aspiration of becoming ‘Africa’s number one digital financial services provider’.

In 2019 the prevailing industry thinking is that any company that has not embarked on a cloud journey is behind the curve. At Nedbank, we see cloud migration as innovative, forward-thinking and a critical enabler of our core capabilities. This understanding has enabled us to craft and execute a sound cloud strategy that is powered by innovation and modern technology, and ensures we are a truly client-centred organisation.

The adoption of cloud offers an opportunity for tremendous change in the way financial services are delivered to clients, as well as several benefits, including:

– The enablement of…

• Agility. This is the first and most significant benefit of leveraging cloud over traditional infrastructure solutions. Findings indicate that about 75% of gains in infrastructure agility can be derived from the transition from initial, on-premise legacy systems to a managed cloud service.
• Cost reduction. Credible benchmarking findings indicate that infrastructure costs may be reduced by between 10% and 40% compared with those of a traditional, ‘pre-cloud’ organisation. Such reductions are possible by improving utilisation and driving economies of scale through the cloud.
• Innovation. Cloud adoption enables the organisation to become more innovative, allowing it to better understand client requirements, in their moments of truth rapidly improving its ability to provide solutions that are relevant to clients while reducing the project delivery time and cost to market.

– The enablement of convenient, on-demand network access to a shared group of configurable computing resources that can be deployed rapidly with minimal human intervention or service provider support.

– The modernisation of financial services and enablement of a platform economy supporting a flexible and scalable financial services model.

– A reduction in the data centre footprint and the enablement of co-location of data centre and cloud facilities through wholesale migration to the cloud.

In crafting our cloud migration strategy, Nedbank relied heavily on gold-standard, industry-leading best practice across public, private and hybrid cloud. Nedbank has chosen a multi-vendor strategy and has partnered with global industry leaders.

Typically, a cloud migration strategy would include three approaches, which can be executed in parallel.

Nedbank’s cloud migration will be supported by network modernisation based on a software-driven network model.

Our approach has been strategically focused on a hybrid cloud model with a blend of on-premise (private) and off-premise (public) cloud solutions. Using both solutions allows for mobility and flexibility between workloads and locations  –  depending on needs and cost as cloud adoption similarly enables our strategy of becoming a digitised,  innovative financial services company that is more efficient, more digital, more agile, more competitive and, most importantly, more client-focused.

A key step was that of selecting which vendors to partner with, a process that was informed by an understanding of their capabilities as well as our own priorities. Nedbank has chosen a multivendor strategy entailing a robust, structured and well-managed selections process, which has resulted in partnerships with global industry leaders.

At Nedbank cloud is not just a buzzword; it is embedded in our technology strategy as a key capability in delivering client solutions that make us more client-centred.

Nedbank’s Cloud migration supports our IT digitisation and modernisation strategies to transform Nedbank and revolutionise our IT ecosystem for improved cost efficiencies and operational effectiveness. Working with Microsoft, our long standing partner and more recently  AWS, supports our aspiration to be ‘Africa’s number one digital financial services provider’ to delight our clients and disrupt our industry.’

For further engagement or information please contact:

Razien Dangor

Mobile: +27 (0) 82 801 1457

Email: raziend@nedbank.co.za

Technology Strategist