World’s largest building society embraces hybrid cloud strategy, selects HPE GreenLake to future-proof IT estate, strengthen operational resilience, ensure compliance, provide sustainable IT and deliver a best-in-class digital experience to customers.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced that Nationwide Building Society, the world’s largest building society, has selected HPE GreenLake cloud for its private cloud deployment, enabling it to accelerate its hybrid cloud journey.
With the addition of HPE GreenLake Management Services as a strategic cloud services provider, Nationwide is realising its vision to use the power of cloud technology to support the evolving needs of its customers.
In 2018, Nationwide kick started an ambitious journey to ensure it was primed for the next generation of digital innovation, with their hybrid cloud strategy being driven by the need for different cloud environments for various types of data and workloads. Leveraging the comprehensive capabilities of HPE GreenLake, Nationwide is creating an agile, scalable, secure, resilient and efficient technology platform.
“In today’s world our customers expect us to deliver an always-on service whilst providing new, innovative features that help them better manage their finances,” said Paul Walsh, Director of Infrastructure & Service Delivery, at Nationwide Building Society.
“Nationwide’s hybrid cloud strategy is vital to our ability to compete and means we can continue to meet the needs and expectations of our customers. HPE GreenLake cloud is a core component of our hybrid cloud strategy. With them we’re building a cloud platform that will further improve our resilience and agility, enabling us to provide even better levels of service and deliver new capabilities to our developers faster than ever before.”
With HPE GreenLake Management Services, Nationwide’s IT team will automate and orchestrate infrastructure management and deliver infrastructure as code. This enables them to focus on innovation, value-add activities and gain better control over application builds and security.
Faster release cycles will accelerate the time to market, providing consistent customer experiences across all digital platforms. At the same time, Nationwide can ensure that sufficient controls are in place to manage risk, protect their customers and meet the demands of regulators, while unlocking the value of cloud technology.
Nationwide’s hybrid cloud strategy fully embraces cloud economics, enabling efficient monitoring and management of consumption HPE GreenLake consumption-based model prevents overprovisioning and allows Nationwide to only pay for capacity that they are using. This is expected to support Nationwide in reducing their IT cost base by at least 30%.
Furthermore, a dedicated service within HPE GreenLake cloud gives the building society a clear overview of their energy consumption and emissions, enabling them to manage their infrastructure more efficiently and reduce the environmental impact. The impact will be further reduced by upcycling and recycling of decommissioned assets, such as the end-of-use compute and storage infrastructure that GreenLake has replaced.
“We are proud to support Nationwide with their cloud vision, providing them with enhanced control and security and the reliability and flexibility for growth,” said Matt Harris, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa at HPE. “Nationwide’s modernisation journey showcases the effectiveness of HPE GreenLake cloud, with the storied institution transitioning from complex, legacy technology to a modern, future-proofed hybrid cloud operating model where a one-size-fits all public cloud could never be the only answer.”
We asked Paul Walsh, Director of IT Infrastructure and Service Delivery, Nationwide, further questions to find out more about the project:
What were the key factors that led Nationwide to choose HPE GreenLake as the foundation for its hybrid cloud strategy?
Partnering with Greenlake to provide our on-premise hosting platform enables us to build on our existing hybrid cloud capabilities and significantly increase the standardisation of our infrastructure. Ultimately, it means we can deliver more relevant services to our internal developers and engineers.
How does Nationwide’s hybrid cloud strategy align with its goal of enhancing customer experiences and introducing innovative financial services?
We want a flexible and standardised set of infrastructure hosting platforms that allow us to deliver resilient services to our customers and as an organisation spend more time on delivering innovation and features to our customers.
Can you elaborate on how HPE GreenLake Management Services have transformed Nationwide’s IT operations, particularly regarding automation and security?
Greenlake has provided us with a platform that we have been able to use to further enhance the overall security and resilience of our services, whilst providing the foundations for our aspirations to deliver more services as code, increasing our overall efficiency.
What are some tangible results or early successes Nationwide has achieved since implementing HPE GreenLake, such as reduced costs or improved efficiency?
We have been able to reduce ~30% of our technology costs following the move to Greenlake and create the foundations for our move to a full Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) environment. This enables us to deliver higher quality infrastructure, quicker with fewer manual activities and handoffs.
What challenges did Nationwide face in transitioning from its legacy systems to the modern hybrid cloud infrastructure, and how were these addressed?
Ensuring we can migrate thousands of workloads seamlessly with no business interruptions was imperative for us. We worked closely with HPE and our other supply chain partners to develop a migration framework that provided us with a single standardised approach, enabling safe and efficient migration of all the servers.