This is how we are developing Santander’s Hybrid Cloud strategy
At Santander we have succeeded in implementing one of the most rapid world cloud adoption projects. We have migrated 90% of the virtual infrastructure in less than 3 years. We have a hybrid platform which gives us the advantages of the public cloud and the private cloud (OHE — Optimised Hosting Environment).
This article contains an interview from mid-2021, when the Cloud programme was at 60% of virtual machines migrated.
What is OHE? ☁️
OHE (Optimized Hosting Environment) is a strategy for evolution of Santander Group’s infrastructure and technological platform to a hybrid Cloud.
A hybrid Cloud is a more flexible, scalable and secure Cloud based on hyperconvergence which is hosted in our Data Centers; together with the public clouds already certified by the Group, including all the computing, storage, microservice and life-cycle capabilities for both infrastructure and applications.
“Thanks to the cloud, we have been able to boost usage of digital channels by 60%, and have managed to allow all employees to work from home as if they were at the office in record time”
Said Eric Cambos, Cloud Infrastructure Director in this interview from 2021.
Dirk Marzluf, chief operating and technology officer at Banco Santander, said:
“Helping customers and creating the best customer experience is key for Santander. To achieve this, we are innovating and moving our services to the most advanced cloud-based platforms. Our cloud adoption is one of the fastest in the world by a global company: we have moved 200 servers to the cloud every working day over the last two years. So we are progressing every day to become the best open financial services platform.”
The T&O Cloud Programme
It sets out to boost the bank’s digital transformation and improve the customer experience.
The Cloud Programme helps streamline adoption of the Santander cloud, in line with the group’s main strategies of simplification and modernisation of our technology infrastructure.
Thanks to incorporation of the cloud, we can improve all the bank’s processes using cutting-edge technology and ushering in profitability, security and high performance. Among other things, the cloud enables us to:
- Adapt to the demands of the market, with the ability to enlarge or reduce infrastructure in a single click at our Marketplace (self-service portal for group companies also accessible via API)
- Take rapid decisions thanks to agile tests on public or private clouds, as necessary.
- Efficiency, since resources can be shared to provide a global service.
- Standardise and homogenise, defining common policies to ensure that everything is within the regulatory framework established.
- Facilitate teleworking for employees, including the Contact Centre.
- Reduce technology obsolescence and optimise space at Data Centers.
José Manuel Parrilla, Managing Director Cloud Competence Centre, says:
“We have solutions that have shown a 99% improvement. These are major solutions such as ATMs, front panels or customer access applications”.
This helps us improve our service for customers, with better adaptation to their needs in a more agile, secure manner, and obtaining a high level of satisfaction.
Why have we opted for the hybrid Cloud?
A hybrid Cloud offers you the capacity to decide depending on the type of updoad where you want to deploy it.
Also, we have greater flexibility and agility when it comes to making decisions and executing projects, because we can perform testing at a much lower cost and in much shorter time by launching it on the public cloud and then making the decision as to how it will be implemented in the private cloud.
This Cloud allows us greater standardisation and harmonisation. Even in terms of risks, that’s an advance for the Group because in the end it allows us to define common policies and a common compliance framework for all entities, resulting in greater efficiency.
Other advantage is the pay-as-you-go, which is very important as it provides us with traceability of consumption, which is a plus when preparing the system plan and assessing product viability.
Finally, in Santander we have access in self-consume to a Marketplace, a portal where developers can access the infrastructure, and to which, with an API, developers can provision resources. It is the same Marketplace in all the Santander Group regions, which facilitates the administration of the platform, incidents management and the mobility of people with a common knowledge base.
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