ING Direct Australia: Using Cloud for Banking
Earlier this year ING Direct Australia transitioned all of their banking procedures to an in-house private cloud solution, called Zero Touch. ING Direct is setting the standards as the first Australian bank to move entirely to the cloud. This move took around a year to complete and follows ING Direct’s initial cloud product ‘Bank in a Box’ that was launched back in 2012.
Zero Touch, was created as a means of simplifying of ING Direct’s production environment by changing the face of computing, networks and storage structures. It is made up of a multifaceted public cloud environment containing Paas and Saas solutions. To develop the project ING Direct employed the help of systems integrator Dimension Data, as well as the technical expertise of Cisco, NetApp and Microsoft.
Simon Andrews, COO at ING Direct said, “We have completely re-platformed the bank applying our “Bank in a Box” innovation, which virtualised our Development and Test environments to Production. We believe this project is unique, making us the only bank to have moved its entire systems to a cloud environment.”
Andrews explained “It’s about agility and cost.” The running of the entire bank system is able to be achieved with only 40 servers, this is a significant change from the 800 plus legacy systems that were being used previously. ING Direct is now being run on standard rackable x86 boxes as opposed to the five different computing environments from the prior protocol.
“Cloud technology is a real enabler,” Andrews says. “The project has opened up space for us to innovate and create rather than just operate and maintain the supporting infrastructure. For customers, it means improved service standards and an increased capacity for the bank to deliver product and service enhancements.”
