CBA wants to migrate two-thirds of compute into public cloud by the end of FY22

Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has set its sight towards having two-thirds of its workloads in the public cloud by the end of the 2022 financial year.

At the end last financial year, CBA hit the 44% mark, according to Tara Le Friedman, CBA strategy performance and transformation general manager.

Speaking during VMware’s virtual 2021 VMworld conference, Le Friedman detailed that the bank’s decision to stand up three “execution factories” has been the driving force behind the pace for the bank’s migration of its workload to the cloud, a project that only kicked off a year ago.

As Le Friedman puts it, the execution factories are “constructs that allows us to apply repeatable patterns and activities to allow us to be able to do it a lot more faster, more efficiently”.

One of the factories, Le Friedman said, is a rehost migration factory, which allows the bank to migrate its on-premise virtual machines into VMC on AWS.

“That allowed us to migrate quite a lot of compute capability into the cloud environment. A key win there was our rehost factory was able to migrate over 3,500 VMs into the cloud environment just in the last financial year,” she said.

“The pace that we were going, at one point in time, we were migrating about 500 VMs per week. I think that put us into the top tier in terms pace, but also … we’re probably the largest VMC environment in Asia and Japan.”

Another one of those factories is a retirement and decommission factory, designed to decommission legacy assets across the group as part of BAU.

In July last year, CBA announced it was planning to send the majority of its apps to the cloud. At the time, CBA boss Matt Comyn was pushing the idea of the yellow and black bank becoming the “best digital experience in Australia, bar none”.

He reinforced those plans in May, highlighting the move would deliver lower marginal cost compared with running data centres, but also higher resilience and availability.

“A big part of what we think strategically is we want to reimagine the products and services that we provide to our customers,” Comyn said.

“So we very much see our cloud strategy as one that we want to see facilitate much greater velocity and innovation inside the Commonwealth Bank.”

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