Barclays Goes Big on Private Cloud To Get Personal
- By CDOTrends editors
- January 03, 2022
With digital and traditional competitors worldwide nipping at its heels, Barclays is going all-in to build a massive private cloud platform for its global businesses as a response.
It is banking on Hewlett Packard Enterprise to drive this initiative and use the vendor’s HPE GreenLake as the platform’s foundation.
According to a recent release, the automated and open cloud platform will host thousands of workloads, and it will allow the bank to make banking more personal for its customers.
The HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform will also play a significant role in the bank’s hybrid multi-cloud strategy and digital transformation across Barclays’ global businesses.
“Today, our customers expect an intelligent, contextual, and personalized digital experience with seamless performance. With HPE GreenLake, we’re building a cloud platform that will enable the agility and operational performance needed to achieve this ambition while providing a modern economic model for private cloud,” said Craig Bright, group chief information officer at Barclays.
According to the announcement, the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform will provide a unified on-premises cloud experience. It will have capacity available on-demand and granular consumption-based pricing for compute, memory, and storage resources, offering the resilience, scalability, and efficiency to meet the high standard of performance required in today’s digital world.
“Banking systems are critical national infrastructure. Resilience, sustainability, and security of the underlying technology platform are the non-negotiable fundamentals that enable the provision of personalized digital experiences,” said Marc Waters, senior vice president and managing director U.K., Ireland, Middle East & South Africa at HPE.
Barclays’ global private cloud platform will host thousands of apps and over 100,000 workloads, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), SQL databases, Windows server, and Linux. HPE Pointnext Services is migrating the legacy infrastructure to the private cloud with the Barclays team.
Barclays will use HPE GreenLake Central to manage costs, utilization, compliance, and security through a unified global dashboard across the entire private cloud estate. The infrastructure environment is managed by HPE, ensuring constant uptime, regular patching and updates, and automation-driven infrastructure optimization. The bank will only pay for the resources they consume on the HPE GreenLake platform, with the option to reserve workloads and run them on-demand.
“Our fully managed HPE GreenLake platform provides infrastructure, software, and services that enable automation, control, flexibility, exceptional experience, and a positive commercial advantage,” Waters added.
Image credit: iStockphoto/AmandaLewis