Business opportunity
Since 2018, National Australia Bank (NAB) has pursued a cloud-first, multi-cloud strategy, positioning itself as one of the global leaders in cloud adoption. Currently, over 84% of NAB's applications operate across various cloud providers. This, coupled with NAB’s customer-centric focus, led NAB’s Asset Servicing team to modernise 23 essential business-critical applications to the cloud to ensure they were future-proof and able to better service its customers. This enhanced resiliency enables more reliable applications, ensuring smoother, uninterrupted services and better experiences for NAB’s customers.
Technical challenge
This project presented several technical challenges for the team. In-scope applications had to maintain seamless integration with the broader Asset Servicing application portfolio during the multi-wave cloud migration. This, combined with the substantial size of some of the application databases, pushed the limits of data transfer capacity and necessitated an innovative approach to accommodate time-limited maintenance windows. Additionally, the reliance on database links added another layer of complexity, requiring meticulous planning of migration timing and dependencies to minimise disruptions.
The solution
NAB, along with Kyndryl and other partners, successfully modernised and migrated the 23 applications to Microsoft Azure. The project began with an in-depth discovery of current applications, which informed the project plan and migration schedule. This discovery phase enabled the team to develop a target roadmap and a plan to achieve business goals within NAB’s timeline.
Kyndryl supported the NAB team to define the Azure landing zones, specified target sizing, and created and validated migration runbooks. Each application's component stack was modernised to enhance capabilities such as encryption and privileged access management, leading to carefully planned migration waves for these applications. The success of the project was ensured through deep technical skills, thorough testing and strong teamwork.
Given the complexities associated with many of our applications, this cloud modernisation effort is a significant achievement which will ensure these applications are now setup for the future.
The power of partnership
Through its strategic alliance with Microsoft, Kyndryl was able to unlock additional cost savings and incentives that reduced the costs of migration. Weekly customer success meetings with Microsoft provided access to additional Azure expertise helping to ensure the successful delivery of project milestones.
What progress looks like
NAB, with the support of Kyndryl and other partners, successfully completed the modernisation and migration of all 23 in-scope applications with zero unscheduled downtime and no customer impacts. Other key outcomes:
- Enhanced resiliency of critical business applications running on cloud leading to smoother operations and an improved customer experience.
- Decommissioned 200+ servers – physical and virtual – simplifying the environment by cutting the total number of server instances by half.
- Introduced automatic overnight shutdown of non-production instances without business disruption.
