How CK Helped Boost a Bank’s Business with VMC on AWS

VMWare Cloud or VMC on AWS is a hybrid cloud solution that allows businesses to extend their on-premises virtual machine environments to the AWS Cloud.

On one recent morning, the CTO of a major Asian bank got an urgent message on his mobile phone: the latest version of a customer-facing app had crashed, and the bank’s customers would have problems with their transactions. A flurry of worry passed through his head – the regulatory issues, the fiduciary fines, the customer complaints, and the roasting on social and traditional media – would follow.

“I made a series of phone calls, woke up my team, and put everybody on high alert,” the CTO reminisced. “I then remembered that we had signed up with CK (Cloud Kinetics), our newest consultant and technology partner. I called CK and hoped they could help.”

The bank had started operations in the 1970s and now had multiple branches across ASEAN. It became a commercial bank in the 1980s. It soon received a license to operate as a universal bank that could offer a suite of commercial, consumer, private, and digital banking products and services. By 2021, it had more than 5,000 employees and US$25 billion in total assets. And now, its reputation was at stake.

“We have always been among the first to embrace tech innovations to empower our customers,” the CTO noted. “We have consistently been recognized as one of Asia’s leading companies, ranking among the region’s top banks in terms of profitability and efficiency. We had to find a solution for our current crisis – fast.”

• The bank ran its data centre. 
• It had recently begun its journey to a cloud computing model and moved some of its workloads to the AWS cloud. 
• While there were complaints in general about the bank’s apps not loading fast enough, that had never led to a crisis. Until now. How quickly could the issue be rectified? The CK team was notified.

VMC on AWS solution

The CK team understood the situation and recommended that the bank move its VMware workloads from the data center to AWS cloud. This move of VMC on AWS, would help the bank boost access to its online services, enable faster time to market, reduce its provision/deployment time, and recover faster from potential DevOps failures.

Why VMware?

As the bank was already running VMware. It could leverage the same tools, processes, skills, and teams on the AWS platform.

Why AWS?

VMware Cloud on AWS, called VMC allows enterprises to simplify, accelerate and modernize their existing DR (disaster recovery) solutions by leveraging their existing VMware-based DR solutions with AWS Cloud-based DRaaS (DR as a Service) capabilities.

Why CK?

CK is one of the few AWS MSPs (Managed Services Providers) in the Asia-Pacific region. It has 500 certifications – 166+ on AWS and VMware combined – and has implemented 300 migrations for about 450 customers in the Asia-Pacific region.

“We’re proud to be the first platform-ready AWS MSP in this region to offer VMC for enterprises,” noted Haji Munshi, Group CEO of Cloud Kinetics. “We can help companies achieve up to 40% return on IT investments and return on efficiency by helping them migrate their VMware workloads to VMC.”

The result showed a dramatic difference. The bank saw improvements of up to 500 percent faster time-to-market, up to 90 percent reduction in deployment time and a stunning 25x faster recovery from DevOps deployment failures.

“CK could bring out the best of VMWare and AWS on the combined VMC solution,” the CTO said. “We could cut our CAPEX cost, as well as leverage our existing investments in VMware and AWS licenses. CK also helped to train our technical staff on VMC.”

VMC would be a key pillar for CK’s growth going forward. “VMC offers large enterprises an integrated solution to reduce complexity, control costs, increase agility and connect data silos on the AWS cloud,” CK’s CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) Ted A, said. “CK offers a unique combination of competencies for companies to accomplish this.”

Banks, telcos, and other large, complex, distributed enterprises face complications migrating their workloads from ageing legacy infrastructure to a hybrid cloud computing environment. The issues are compounded with a proliferation of data silos, operating platforms, cybersecurity concerns, and the infusion of AI/ML for richer app experiences.

The VMC solution provides consistency across hybrid environments, either on the data center or the cloud. VMC customers can operate to extend applications into AWS native services, leveraging the best of both worlds. CK is a robust third pillar because CK has unparalleled expertise and capability in VMC in Asia.