RBL Bank has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud service to drive digital transformation. At present, around 40 per cent of the bank’s mission-critical applications are on the cloud, a top official of the bank told BusinessLine.
Stating that the cloud journey at RBL began 12 months back with the setting up of the cloud environment and a secure landing zone, Sankarson Banerjee, Chief Information Officer - RBL Bank, said the bank has been investing in technology tools and platforms to offer agile, reliableand superior solutions.
The bank first migrated its corporate website to AWS cloud and with the experience gained initiated a 10-in-10 project (a complete migration of 10 applications in 10 days). Then, in September last, the bank took the plunge by migrating actual production workloads to the cloud. “At present, close to 72-73 workloads (mission critical applications) have been moved to AWS; we will be moving the heavier workloads soon,” said RBL Bank’s CIO, adding “with all tech developments happening on the cloud, the shift towards the cloud is becoming evitable”.
The bank chose AWS for its commitment to security and highly reliable global infrastructure. “Speed of deployment is crucial to ensure hassle-free services. Further, the Opex model offered by the cloud allows us to pay on the go and only for the resources consumed and the time for which the resource is consumed. Migrated applications spans across lines of businesses and functions such as Retail Assets, Branch and Business Banking, Operations, HR, customer facing websites etc,” Banerjee said.
Highlighting the benefits of AWS, he said: “They have the capability to implement right sizing. Before initiating this project, we had to forecast the IT resources to be provisioned and more often than not, the estimates would be on the higher side; with cloud, the IT team at RBL does not have to worry about resources and procurement.
“The traditional procurement cycle for buying infrastructure on-premise was a big hurdle for meeting business expectations. Cloud is cost neutral for us. And during times such as the present, our transaction volumes had shot up over 6 times. It would have been difficult to scale up the infrastructure during the pandemic. AWS has been a blessing for us,” he said