NAB credits cloud for critical service resiliency

NAB has sought to emphasise resilience gains from cloud migration and unspecified “service improvements”, pointing to a 17 percent reduction in “critical” and “high” rated incidents year-on-year.

NAB CEO Ross McEwan
NAB

The formal portion of the bank’s FY23 annual results were light on technology detail, with much of it found in presentation appendices.

The major change year-on-year is that where annual results a year ago had a technology focus on “strong foundations” [pdf], this year [pdf] is more about what the foundations have enabled the bank to achieve.

The bank puts a particular focus on resilience: it publishes some numbers on this already, but the results offer a more current and whole-of-year view.

They highlight a 99.89 percent “average availability” across NAB’s top 47 critical services and a 17 percent year-on-year reduction in critical and high-rated incidents, though there isn’t anything to compare this to.

There appears to be a minor change in performance over a five-year period: in last year’s full-year results, the bank reported an 86 percent reduction in high and critical incidents since FY18, but this is now 83 percent.

iTnews understands the "reduction" is because the figure for FY23 is incomplete, and excludes performance results for Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) which are yet to be finalised.

On cloud migration - credited as a factor in boosting resilience - NAB said it has migrated 77 percent of apps, and is targeting having 83 percent migrated by the end of its FY24 period.

The bank has previously contemplated changing the measure of progress on cloud migration, though has stuck to the apps migrated number in its financial reporting.

NAB also claimed a greater than 50 percent reduction in the “time to contain cyber threats” against its infrastructure and environment since FY19, which it partly attributed to “significant non-discretionary investment in cyber security capability and technology risk reduction.”

The bank reported a 7.6 percent increase in statutory net profit to $7.4 billion, and cash earnings of $7.7 billion.