Microsoft's Jason Zander
Microsoft has inked a new five-year strategic multi-cloud technology partnership with National Australia Bank and Bank of New Zealand.
Under the terms, both companies will co-design, share development and resourcing investment in architecting a multi-cloud ecosystem that will play host to more than 1,000 NAB applications to Microsoft Azure as the primary cloud, while also ensuring they can run across another cloud if required.
So far, more than 800 applications have been moved to public cloud providers as part of the bank’s cloud-first strategy.
The bank expects the proportion of apps on public cloud will move from one third, to around 80 per cent by 2023.
Customised Microsoft training will also be provided to 5,000 NAB and BNZ technologists as part of the NAB Cloud Guild program.
Microsoft Azure executive vice president Jason Zander said the vendor will collaborate and co-innovate with NAB -- creating compelling customer experiences and streamlining the bank’s own operations. Microsoft’s global engineering team is supporting the program.
NAB Group Executive Technology and Enterprise Operations, Patrick Wright said it aims to reduce development timelines for system changes and improvements from six weeks down to two days.
“The investment we’ve made in technology to date has built a strong, cloud-first foundation that’s enabled colleagues to execute better and deliver much better experiences for our customers,” he said.
In 2018, NAB and Microsoft worked together on a proof of concept ATM that uses facial recognition and a PIN to authorise transactions, using a cloud-based application built with Azure Cognitive Services.
In September last year, NAB’s expanded its multi-cloud strategy to encompass Google Cloud, joining Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) in its portfolio of public cloud providers.
