The Australia and New Zealand Banking Corporation (ANZ) in October last year turned to Red Hat for help to bring its internet banking proof of concept to life.
The bank wanted to modernise its internet banking platform that had passed its end of life and required extended support for some years. Deciding on a Red Hat OpenShift platform, tech area lead for ANZ’s digital arm Raghavendra Bhat said the bank wanted to not constrain itself to a cloud-only solution.
ANZ has now migrated 30% of its traffic to the platform and within the first hour of go-live, it processed around AU$2.9 billion worth of payments.
Speaking with media on Wednesday, Bhat said the bank’s expectation is to complete about 80% of the traffic transition onto the new platform by November, with complete transition by March. He said there has been no “cookie-cutter approach” for how it has lifted and shifted the old system onto the new one.
“Our primary focus is to make sure that they transition seamlessly from A to B,” he said.
“The previous architecture was there for a very long period of time and we are now transitioning to a more microservices, cloud native-based architecture with OpenShift and that is the biggest transition in terms of the set up between the old and the new.”
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ANZ’s environment is a mix of cloud and on-premises technologies, but Bhat said the decision to go with OpenShift was to allow the bank to keep its options open for the future.
“We want to keep our options open in the longer term and Red Hat gives us the best architectural footprint in terms of an on-prem, cloud native application which can be heavily containerised — a more microservices based architecture aligned with the broader direction of where we’re going as an organisation as well,” he told ZDNet.
“It also gives us the flexibility to choose where the workload runs … if we do decide to move from on-prem to off-prem … it gives us the right foundational capability to start to focus on what that transition looks like if we are looking to make that decision.”
Bhat said a focus for ANZ has been finding the right balance between on-premise versus off-premise.
“[By looking] at all opportunities to make that journey as seamless as possible and having something like Open Shift, which gives us the capability to containerise a lot of these things without necessarily having to worry about where that workload is running … that is something we want to do more of so having that flexibility is really the core,” he said.
“The biggest opportunity for us is now we have the right foundations to start to leverage a lot of the capabilities and export them as APIs or features that can be consumed by other application channels within the bank and that gives us a lot more synergy from a customers point of view.”
