NAB to move '1000 apps in 1000 days' into Azure

NAB is set to move into a new wave of cloud transformation with 1000 apps from across NAB and Bank of New Zealand’s stacks to be migrated to run in Azure in 1000 days.

The ‘1000 apps in 1000 days’ goal was reported by the Australian Financial Review and is a play on - or dig at - AWS’ ‘30 apps in 30 days’ program, which is designed to get AWS customers to migrate at scale.

NAB didn’t meet that goal - it managed 30 apps in 50 days - and the far more ambitious 1000 apps in 1000 days is listed as a goal the bank and Microsoft will “endeavour” to meet.

However, it is an unsubtle dig at what is being framed as a change of preferred cloud allegiance within NAB.

NAB group executive for technology and enterprise operations Patrick Wright said in a statement that NAB had already moved “more than 800 applications to public cloud providers as part of its cloud first, multi-cloud strategy” run over the past couple of years.

“NAB’s proportion of apps on public cloud will move from one-third, to around 80 percent by 2023,” he said.

“The investment we’ve made in technology to date has built a strong, cloud-first foundation that’s enabled colleagues to execute better and deliver much better experiences for our customers.

“We’re thrilled to have Microsoft’s support and investment in this partnership, to further shift the bank to the cloud.”

Microsoft has been trying to muscle its way into NAB, previously an AWS stronghold, since late 2018, though it has long been unclear just how much headway the Azure operator had made.

The program that it has agreed today comes with the complicating factor that it covers app stacks at two different banks - NAB and BNZ.

It is understood about 70 percent of the apps will come from NAB and the remaining 30 percent from BNZ.

In addition, Wright said that all workloads and apps destined for Azure would be packaged up in a way that they could effectively be hosted on any cloud.

“The partnership will see NAB Group and Microsoft share development costs and resourcing investment to architect a multi-cloud ecosystem that will host 1000 of the banks’ applications to Microsoft Azure as the primary cloud, while ensuring the same applications can be moved to or run across a secondary cloud if necessary,” NAB said in a statement.

Wright went further with the Australian Financial Review, explaining that “regulators around the world are concerned with concentration of risk, so we're working with Microsoft to deploy things in a way that they can run in Microsoft Azure, or another provider, or run simultaneously with two cloud providers at once.”

Microsoft said its global engineering team would support the work, which includes training 5000 NAB and BNZ technologists as part of the NAB cloud guild program. The guild’s founder recently left to join AWS.