INTERVIEW
THE CHANGING FACE OF BANKING ABU DHABI ISLAMIC BANK HAS RECENTLY DEPLOYED A HYBRID CLOUD SOLUTION FROM IBM TO ACCELERATE ITS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY. MAMOUN T. ALHOMSSEY, CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER AT ADIB, TALKS ABOUT PLANS TO PROVIDE IMPROVED DIGITAL BANKING EXPERIENCES TO ITS CUSTOMERS.
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ow important is hybrid cloud to your corporate objectives? ADIB seeks to be a pioneer in the adoption of a hybrid multi-cloud architecture which is focused less on physical connectivity and more on supporting the versatility of workloads to suit various business needs. Our objectives around this are enhancing cost optimisation, advancing our digital transformation, and reducing our exposure to private clouds. The hybrid cloud environment brings cost optimisation through a scalable infrastructure and operational efficiency through automated testing and deployment capabilities. The scalability and speed to market that a public cloud brings, coupled with ADIB’s existing private cloud resources, makes the combination - a hybrid cloud architecture - essential for ADIB to fulfil its strategic objective of driving digital transformation at pace. With intense competition amongst banks, an ever-escalating number of transactions, and the speed of innovation today, rapidly delivered advantages are key to the business and through a hybrid cloud we have an ideal architecture to deliver them. Can you provide details or a use case about how IBM hybrid cloud solutions have helped to automate ADIB’s improved customer service? IBM’s hybrid cloud solutions have 30
CXO INSIGHT ME
APRIL 2021
AS PART OF ADIB’S DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION STRATEGY, WE ARE CONSTANTLY ADDING NEW APPLICATIONS SUCH AS ADIB CHATBOT, WHEREBY WE LEVERAGED A SAAS-BASED CONVERSATIONAL AI PLATFORM HOSTED IN A PUBLIC CLOUD, WHILE ALSO USING IN-HOUSE RESOURCES, SUCH AS THE IBM API CONNECT, ESB MIDDLEWARE AND BACKEND SYSTEMS. empowered ADIB through platforms that deliver standardisation, agility and innovation in both IT and business processes. Enterprise financial cloud expectations are very different from consumer cloud needs and hence, at ADIB, we must connect critical assets from on-premise systems to private
cloud and public cloud platforms. IBM’s hybrid cloud technology provides the bridge which allows all three. For instance, IBM’s RedHat OpenShift Container supports our cloud journey at ADIB providing unique technologies that cover monitoring and security, robust isolation options, data protection and performance needs. With OpenShift, our developers have a fast and secure way to containerise and deploy enterprise workloads in Kubernetes clusters. OpenShift clusters build on Kubernetes to offer consistency and flexibility for the development lifecycle in our operations. The flexibility to respond to sudden changes is key to ADIB, and the development of our digital channels has helped ADIB to react to evolving customer behaviors to ensure we’re always providing an exceptional banking experience. What new services have you been able to bring to market as a result of implementing IBM’s hybrid cloud solution for ADIB? IBM provides ADIB with adaptable solutions, allowing us to migrate from private data centers to public clouds. As part of ADIB’s digital transformation strategy, we are constantly adding new applications such as ADIB Chatbot, whereby we leveraged a SaaS-based conversational AI platform hosted in a public cloud, while also using
