Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), one of Australia’s Big Four banks and one of New Zealand’s top banks, offers commercial and retail banking and financial services from more than 1,100 branches and offices. The bank offerings include standard deposit and lending services, credit cards, wealth management, agribusiness finance and insurance, and foreign exchange services for other financial institutions.
In 2021, ANZ Bank unveiled its strategy to drive digital transformation, increase their speed to market and become more agile. Data and analytics are the essential engines in this strategy which entails upgrading the bank’s core banking technology to deliver reliable, efficient, and secure services for their customers while safeguarding critical data.
Optimizing the bank’s Enterprise Big Data Platform
ANZ Bank used Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) to develop their new strategic Enterprise Big Data (EBD) platform, an intelligent, data-driven, and agile blueprint to meet the needs of the bank’s customers and its partners. The migration to CDP from their legacy platform would enhance and strengthen the bank’s critical repository, optimizing the bank’s platform such that it would be ready to meet new and more demanding analytical requirements, by facilitating access to data used in reporting and analytics for different users across the organisation.
The EBD platform supports more than 10 internal and customer-facing groups with their Data Operations and Data Discovery requirements. To minimize disruption to operations and downtime, the bank opted for a side-car migration – migrating an existing deployment to a new cluster deployed on new hardware running the latest version of CDP Private Cloud Base. The approach offered lower risks and allowed for comprehensive platform and application testing.
Anthony Hua, Product Area Lead at ANZ said: “The bank’s data growth is extraordinary, as is the demand to effectively store and manage our data across the group. The data we handle today continues to grow exponentially, which calls for us to re-architecture the platform for improved infrastructure utilization. The move to the Cloudera Data Platform helps us make faster decisions to deliver the best business outcomes from data, improve our competitiveness, optimize our service offerings, maintain high security standards and prime the bank for the shift to a hybrid data environment.”
A successful collaboration model
The migration was completed on time and seamlessly by Cloudera’s Professional Services team, in collaboration with the ANZ Bank team. With Cloudera’s Customer Success Manager serving as the migration program manager working with both ANZ and Cloudera’s project stakeholders, the collaboration model utilized best practices to remove technical and commercial barriers to adoption while minimizing risks during the project implementation process. This was achieved through various steps, such as conducting workshops and engaging different stakeholders in the planning stage, carrying out differing levels of tests according to the applications’ importance to ensure that the platform would run smoothly downstream.
One of the critical success factors in managing the costs of the migration involved a rolling migration of servers from CDH to CDP in tandem with data migrated, which ensured there would be enough capacity available for both workload and storage.
To better handle future demands for advanced analytics, the project teams worked to reorganise the data using 70 servers for Data Discovery and 55 for Data Operations. For the go-live a total of 5PB of data was replicated and 13 applications were successfully migrated to the new platform.
“The scale of the platform migration required great depth in expertise, and we fully trusted Cloudera to make the right decisions and tackle complex challenges every step of the way, from planning to go-live. Cloudera’s Professional Services provided necessary guidance including planning the best path for migration, identifying workarounds to major blockers and supporting application migration. We are confident that this has created more room for data exploration that will enable functions such as more efficient payment processes.” said Anthony Hua, Product Area Lead, ANZ Bank
