Migrating 30 Apps in 50 Days at National Australia Bank: Contino and AWS Professional Services

About the Client

Contino and AWS Professional Services helps National Australia Bank successfully achieve a rapid migration of 30 on-premise applications to public cloud in 50 days.

NAB is one of the four largest financial institutions in Australia in terms of market capitalisation, earnings and customers. NAB was ranked 21st largest bank in the world, measured by market capitalisations.

The Challenge

NAB is facing significant technological disruption from its competitors in the marketplace. In order to service their customers better and remain competitive, NAB has publicly acknowledged the need to aggressively push ahead with an accelerated change program targeting massive IT transformation and workforce automation.

A key element to achieving a successful transformation and delivering the considerable savings that NAB has promised its shareholders is the transition of the bank’s workloads to the public cloud. Executing this kind of change in a highly-regulated environment coupled with the bank’s legacy IT ecosystem presented a number of substantial challenges.

Clearly, it was necessary to demonstrate what “is possible” if NAB was prepared to embrace a different approach. This approach was to put the bank under stress, experiment with new ways of working and successfully migrate 30 applications in 50 days. Yes that’s right, fully migrate 30 applications from NAB’s traditional on-premise data centres to an AWS Landing Zone in 10 weeks without compromising any compliance, security or regulatory requirements.

The Solution

Working in close partnership, AWS Professional Services and Contino formed a team that was embedded alongside a small but specialised Accelerated Migration Program (AMP) team from NAB to deliver “30 in 50”. The Contino and AWS Professional Services’ team comprised a broad range of specialist skills including consulting, database and testing expertise as well as deep AWS technical competency and experience. This cross-functional team was critical to meeting the needs of NAB and pushing the boundaries of traditional IT change management in a bank.

During the project, Contino and AWS ProServ successfully delivered:

• A rapid discovery process to identify and qualify a candidate list of suitable applications targeted for rapid migration
• Application specific design documentation detailing the “as is” and “to be” designs for each workload moving to AWS
• A suite of migration run books detailing the step by step processes to successfully achieve each end to end migration and satisfy internal NAB change controls
• Consistent, strong and repeatable patterns to move applications and databases
• Fit-for-purpose test strategies to optimise transition, customer acceptance and cutover timelines
• Rapid and successful migration of 30 applications across multiple AWS landing zones that included several OS and DBMS uplifts as well as database migrations to RDS

The Business Outcome

Successfully migrating 30 applications in 50 days proved to NAB what is possible. Rapid and sustainable change is achievable by leveraging the power of Cloud Computing and adopting effective communication and engagement practices across all levels of stakeholder groups.

NAB now has a production-ready cloud platform that can be leveraged to launch future waves of application migrations at pace and scale. As a result of the success of the Accelerated Migration Program, NAB has a strong mandate to move the program forward and the team is excited and optimistic about what the future holds!

Some examples of immediate and tangible benefits for NAB include:

• Traditional timeframes and SLAs for managing and executing IT change across a bank have been challenged and myths about “why everything must take so long” have been dispelled
• Measurable technical debt has already been retired across the bank
• Legacy ways of working and traditional ways of hosting IT applications in a bank have been demonstrated to be inefficient
• Significant knowledge transfer and competency uplift across several different teams

This AMP is a key element to NAB’s highly publicised intention to invest $1.5 billion in an aggressive digital transformation agenda over the next three years and generate annual cost savings of $1 billion from 2020.