NAB insourcing staff as its shifts to cloud
The National Australia Bank (NAB) is doing away with outsourcing IT staff and services and is instead hiring thousands of staff as part of its shift to cloud. NAB said a recent series of outages were caused by the bank’s practice of outsourcing technology service providers and the challenges in shifting from outdated technology systems. The bank revealed, as part of its first half results this month, that it suffered the worst rate of critical incidents to its payment platforms in three years, with eight during the quarter. The bank has shifted to the cloud since 2013, but the bulk of its three-to-five-year tech transformation has been unfolding since late 2017. Steve Day, NAB enterprise general manager for infrastructure, cloud, and workplace, said the bank was at a point in the transformation to handle significant systems such as internet banking, but was also resolving issues caused by a years-long decision to outsource many of its IT staff and services. Day said that model of outsourcing is no longer fit for modern, agile applications as the bank is taking those applications both in-house and onto cloud.
