Axis Bank to migrate 70% of on-premise infra to the cloud with AWS

The third largest private sector bank in India plans to migrate 70% of its on-premises data centre infrastructure in the next 24 months to further reduce cost, improve agility, and improve customer experience. 

Axis Bank on Tuesday said it has signed on existing partner Amazon Web Services (AWS) to further accelerate its digital transformation programme and meet a growing demand for its digital banking services. 

Last year, Axis Bank made the decision to deploy all new customer facing applications on AWS. Currently, 15% of the bank’s applications are already on the cloud. 

As part of a multi-year agreement, Axis Bank will draw on AWS services, including containers, database and compute, to build a portfolio of new digital financial services, as per a joint statement. 

Currently, Axis Bank has deployed over 25 mission-critical applications on AWS, including a Buy Now Pay Later product and a new loan management system to support it, Account Aggregator, Video-Know Your Customer (V-KYC), and WhatsApp Banking, it said. 

Axis Bank said it has over 200 million customers who increasingly demand new and innovative digital banking services, including digital deposits, digital loans, and digital credit cards, to better manage their finances. 

Using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which gives customers the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes applications on AWS or on-premises, Axis Bank built new digital banking products using microservices that support any application architecture, irrespective of scale, load, or complexity. 

“For example, the bank has built fully digital offerings which include its LEAP savings account with a virtual debit card, its NOVA online current account, and OLIVE, its credit card engagement platform, which has serviced more than 3.5 million users since its launch less than two months ago,” Axis said. 

Using Amazon DocumentDB, a durable, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service, Axis Bank runs secure financial transaction processing across its digital bank accounts. 

With Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, Axis Bank will scale workloads on demand to support 10 million daily real-time payments through India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), ensuring reliability and consistent performance. 

Watch: How Covid-19 made Axis Bank think digital and cloud-first

To build a cloud native, design-centric engineering capability, Axis Bank has dedicated over 800 personnel to its digital projects, built an in-house engineering and design team of more than 130 people, and established a cloud engineering practice centered on agile software development and DevOps principles. 

It has also set up a cloud centre of excellence to accelerate its cloud migration and set the digital foundation for innovating new services, while meeting strict governance, security, and regulatory compliance requirements, with AWS Professional Services. 

“Axis Bank is designing new products, crafting digital journeys, and personalizing its services to address the financial needs of its customers better. We continue to anticipate future trends and make investments ahead of time within our technology stack,” Subrat Mohanty, group executive, Axis Bank said.