NAB Connect goes live out of the AWS cloud

September 17, 2020

The National Australia Bank (NAB) has announced the migration of its NAB Connect platform to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

NAB Connect is touted by the red and black bank as a solution for businesses with more advanced online banking requirements. The platform allows for multiple account users and boasts uncapped payment transfers, using PayID; international payment and foreign exchange services; and offers third-party capabilities, such as through accounting software.

The service has over 70,000 business customers, which in the month of August processed a total of AU$141 billion-worth of payments on the platform.

The bank’s enterprise technology executive Steve Day said customers have already benefited from the shift to the cloud. He also said the use of AWS Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides secure and scalable compute capacity.

See also: Amazon Web Services (AWS): A cheat sheet (TechRepublic)

“The migration to cloud has already benefited customers from fewer platform interruptions, allowing us to deliver a seamless customer experience through fluctuations in demand. For example, we supported a 42% increase in usage due to EOFY transactions,” he said.

“Our customers are busy running their businesses, and want their online banking experience to be reliable, simple, and secure. This migration allows us to develop new services to help our business customers drive operational efficiencies, without disrupting their day-to-day activities.”

The NAB Connect platform also uses Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorised behaviour, as well as AWS Auto Scaling, which monitors the application and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain performance.

Day said thanks to AWS’s “flexible infrastructure”, NAB’s infrastructure maintenance times have reduced by 60%.

NAB has been an AWS customer since 2013, and around five years ago, the bank turned to AWS to start its multi-cloud strategy. Since then, NAB has laid the foundations to move its core banking function to the public cloud.

The red and black bank also has partnerships with Microsoft and Google for cloud services, with NAB previously touting its multi-cloud combination as helping the bank deliver new and improved experiences for customers.

It also said previously that it wants to avoid vendor lock-in, but wants to leverage the capabilities of each cloud provider.

“One of the benefits of a multi-cloud approach is the ability to move workloads across platforms and integrate different tools and capabilities. We’re designing our most critical applications to be portable between cloud partners to avoid concentration risk which is an important regulatory and risk consideration,” NAB group executive technology and enterprise operations Patrick Wright said last year.