Company Overview

Nedbank Group is one of South Africa’s four largest banks, and they are continuing to expand to the rest of Africa through subsidiaries and strategic alliances. With a vision to use financial expertise to do good for individuals, families, businesses, and society, Nedbank is focused on creating value and delightful experiences that exceed its clients’ expectations.

The Challenge

As part of creating a delightful experience for its customers, Nedbank decided that it needed to move to the cloud because it is innovative and forward-thinking, and it would support all its core capabilities. In addition, it knew cloud would add agility to its development and provide the ability to add new products or change existing ones with more ease. 

The Solution

Nedbank knew that migrating the mainframe and its applications to the cloud is a journey, so its first step was backing up its mainframe on the cloud. 

“When you ask any infrastructure person what they hate most about the job, it’s migrating from one solution to another,” says Ashwin Naidu, IT Manager at Nedbank. “It normally takes 12 to 18 months to migrate anything. Fortunately, with our approach, it took us just eight months.”

In addition to a faster migration process, Nedbank experienced a huge increase in the performance of its backups. Prior to moving to the cloud, one backup would run for 48 hours. That same backup would be run in just 36 minutes once Nedbank moved to a cloud-based solution. 

The Results

Nedbank has also experienced additional benefits beyond the improved performance of its backups, including a huge cost savings in on-premises infrastructure.

“We freed up MIPS on the mainframe that were originally being used for backups, so we didn’t have to now spend more money for growth,” says Ashwin. 

The move to cloud backups also created greater access to data. Before, with core business applications sitting on the mainframe, the IT teams did not have access to the data as they do today. The data is now “readable,” as Ashwin describes it, and has allowed the bank to better segment its customers and home in on new products to serve their needs. 

Another benefit of moving to cloud has been the time that has been freed up for the IT team, so they are now able to focus on building innovation for the future.

“When we took the decision to move our mainframe backups to the cloud, that triggered off a new spark among the developers to actually look at how they’re going to modernize the mainframe application so that it can also move into the cloud,” says Ashwin.

The next step in Nedbank’s journey is to look at fully implementing the artificial intelligence (AI) and AIOps capabilities of the cloud solution, particularly as it relates to self-service. 

“It’s a very exciting time with AI and AIOps,” says Ashwin, “With the AI capabilities, we can look at things we haven’t thought about before.”