CASE STUDY reputation and market share . The bank linked this reality in part to an inflexible technology backend that didn ’ t support the customer growth acquisition it was pursuing and the need to deliver innovative banking services to new clients . a huge private cloud that enables everything that happens at the back end , front office and at our ATMs . All our front-facing applications in our presentation layer are run on our VMware private cloud ,” said Ilesanmi .
According to Ilesanmi , at the heart of this problem was a three-tier architecture , failing hardware that was becoming nearly impossible to upscale or refresh , and a developer unfriendly backend that was stalling business transformation and future growth .
“ Five years ago , we sat down and said if we are serious about Digital Transformation , we need to move to a software-defined environment instead of buying more midrange servers which were totally unsustainable . When you ’ re growing at speed , you need technology that can help you adapt as fast as possible . The answer was a virtualised software-defined environment and the partner VMware ,” explained Ilesanmi .
The risk of not making the shift was clear to Access Bank . There was potential for the bank to start losing the ground it was trying to make up to be Nigeria ’ s preeminent bank . Or worse , Access Bank would begin to see customer attrition due to trying to service millions of customers manually with inflexible systems that were eating away at IT budgets .
Cashing in on success
Access Bank has seen numerous benefits , but scalability has been the real prize . The bank now has an online loan product that disposes a loan to a qualifying customer in less than 10 seconds .
“ For any business to run this kind of [ loan ] application at the volume we do , you need to be able to scale as needed and increase resources when required . We solved this with a software-defined environment and it ’ s this software-defined layer that VMware handles for us ,” he said .
Other positive factors experienced by the bank include stability and security . The Access Bank card information system hosted on its private cloud must comply with local and global payment card industry ( PCI ) data security standards ( DDS ). The security offered by VMware has been central to the bank ensuring it is able to safeguard critical personal information and that it has not suffered a breach .
Owning the problem , scaling for growth
The reason for choosing VMware was multi-faceted . Ilesanmi said reputation is essential , and VMware was both the market leader and had a proven product environment .
Using VMware vCloud Suite , Access Bank built a rapidly scalable software-defined backend architecture that would embrace the convergence of the private and public cloud . Further , as a financial services company , the environment needed to be secure , so Access Bank deployed the VMware endpoint security solution Carbon Black . Additionally , it deployed VMware Horizon to ring-fence access to its crown jewels : its core banking applications .
“ We laid out a five-year strategic plan that covered everything we wanted to do , and the cloud was an important part of this . You can ’ t do much business transformation if you ’ re not leveraging your private and public clouds in a hybrid model ,” he said .
The new environment also creates a critical link between the bank , its branches , ATMs , and its people with the Access Bank central banking systems , all running on the VMware environment . “ We have
Ilesanmi said the IT team is now also being deployed more effectively . Previously , the bank required 15 engineers to manage 1,000 physical servers . Now , Access Bank requires less than five engineers to support the environment as it uses VMware vRealise Operations to assist it with the automated monitoring of its resources and to help it better understand resource utilisation across the whole bank . The engineers are no longer changing parts or checking drives , which has improved the quality of life of the bank ’ s technology teams .
“ We have seen a great ROI . I did an analysis comparing buying physical versus our virtual VMware servers . Besides the four to six weeks it takes for a server to arrive once ordered , I looked at the cost of the server , power and cooling . The overall savings we are seeing is well over 40 % per server . It ’ s fascinating when you put it into numbers , and it ’ s also a nobrainer ,” added Ilesanmi .
Rolling out new applications is now also much easier , and Access Bank enjoys an agile environment that supports innovation . “ What ’ s the point of developing innovative applications and being agile when you don ’ t have an infrastructure to develop , deploy , or test them on and see how the market will react to them
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