Financial services giant Old Mutual has moved its entire IT infrastructure to the cloud and closed its on-premises data centre facilities, becoming one of the first South African companies of its size to do so.
The move, to Amazon Web Services (AWS) – the world’s largest cloud computing provider – will allow Old Mutual to “accelerate innovation, reduce IT infrastructure costs and harness machine learning to deliver more personalised customer experiences”, AWS said in a statement on Wednesday.
Old Mutual has moved its banking, insurance and wealth management systems to AWS, in the process reducing the average time taken to process financial transactions by two-thirds.
The full migration to the cloud involved moving more than 2 000 on-premises servers, 215 applications, 1 786 databases and more than 500 websites.
“The move will accelerate innovation, at a time of global economic uncertainty, by reducing the time required for new application testing from months to minutes,” AWS said.
“Old Mutual will use AWS capabilities to better anticipate customer needs and develop the next generation of financial products and experiences. The company will leverage AWS ML and generative artificial intelligence (AI) services—including Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service to build, train and deploy ML models—to generate real-time, personalised financial forecasting and recommendations for customers.”
Information Fabric
AWS said the personalisation services possible thanks to the expansion of Information Fabric, the data lake that Old Mutual established on AWS. “The single, consistent view of customers provided by Information Fabric enables individualised recommendations and more seamless, intuitive customer experiences, including combined client rewards programmes that enable points earned in one area of the business to be redeemed through another,” the company said.
“Daily server outages, disconnected financial products, ballooning on-premises costs – those are all challenges we leave behind as we go all-in on AWS,” said Old Mutual acting CIO May Govender. – © 2023 NewsCentral Media