Major bank moves business banking tool to cloud

National Australia Bank (NAB) has announced that it has moved its online business banking platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS), stating that it is the first major Australian bank to move its business banking tool to the cloud.

NAB executive enterprise technology, Steve Day, said AWS service Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) would provide “secure and scalable compute capacity reducing operational risk and cost while supporting platform resilience”.

“AWS gives us flexible infrastructure that can be modified securely in minutes as opposed to days and weeks,” Mr Day said.

“Our infrastructure maintenance times have reduced by 60 per cent, giving our engineers more capacity to innovate and test new services to better serve customer needs.”

Mr Day said the transition to the cloud has resulted in fewer platform interruptions through fluctuations in demand, and has, for example, supported a 42 per cent increase in usage due to end of financial year transactions.

NAB’s platform will be monitored for fraud detection by using Amazon GuardDuty, which is a threat detection service that monitors for malicious activity and unauthorised behaviour on NAB’s account and workload.

AWS’ Auto Scaling tool will monitor the application and automatically adjust capacity to maintain performance, the major bank said.

Commenting on the transition to the cloud, AWS’ director of enterprise in Australia and New Zealand, Karl Durrance, said: “We have been working with NAB since 2013 and are pleased to support them as they take another step forward in their cloud transformation journey.”

NAB Connect currently has over 70,000 business customers using the platform, with $141 billion worth of payments processed in August.

The major bank recently appeared before the House of Representatives standing committee on economics, where it revealed that it had been fighting millions of “ferocious” cyber threats and had seen a 78 per cent increase in fraud attempts over recent months.

NAB CEO Ross McEwan said that, in the first quarter of this year, NAB blocked 197 million cyber threats, and over 41,000 attempts of data theft. In the second quarter, the bank reportedly blocked 261 million attacks.

[Related: COVID heightening bank vulnerability to cyber attack]