Boosting A Bank’s Customer Experience & Agility With VMC On AWS

In the fast-paced and interconnected world of finance, ensuring the seamless functioning of critical systems and applications is vital for any bank. A major global bank encountered a significant setback when their customer-facing app suddenly crashed, impacting the smooth execution of transactions. As the CTO recalls, a flurry of concerns flashed through their minds – regulatory issues, fiduciary fines, customer complaints, and negative publicity would follow if they didn’t act fast.

“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 Cloud Kinetics, our newest consultant and technology partner. I called Cloud Kinetics and hoped they could help.”

Founded in the 70s and with multiple branches across the world, this  bank offered 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 APAC’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 own data centre and had only recently begun its journey to a cloud computing model, moving 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.

When Cloud Kinetics team was notified and understood the situation, the team recommended that the bank move its VMware workloads from the data centre to AWS cloud. This move to 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 or 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 Cloud Kinetics for VMC on AWS?
Cloud Kinetics is one of the few accredited AWS Managed Services Providers (MSPs) in the Asia-Pacific region. It has 400+ certifications – 166+ on AWS and VMware combined – and has implemented 300+ migrations for about 350 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. 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.”Haji Munshi, Group CEO, Cloud Kinetics

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.

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

VMC would be a key pillar for Cloud Kinetics’ 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,” Chief Revenue Officer Ted Aravinthan said. “Cloud Kinetics 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, whether on the data centre or the cloud. VMC customers can operate to extend applications into AWS native services, leveraging the best of both worlds. Cloud Kinetics acts as a robust third pillar because of its unparalleled expertise and capability in VMC.