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.

How 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 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

in-house resources, such as the IBM API Connect, ESB middleware and backend systems.

Through this hybrid cloud approach, we have been able to deploy the ADIB Chat Banking service as well as an ADIB Care chatbot for our employees. Looking ahead, we will be using the same approach to deploy a chat banking solution for our Gen-Y customers. In addition, we have used similar technology to modernise legacy applications, such as our cutting-edge mobile banking solution and retail internet banking experience.

Specifically, we are building and transforming applications to use microservices architecture, which breaks applications into smaller, loosely coupled, reusable components focused on specific business functions. These applications are deployed in containers - lightweight executable units using IBM’s RedHat OpenShift platform and Ansible. Through this innovative architecture ADIB has managed to modernise digital channels at scale while also automating internal processes.

How has ADIB adapted to hybrid cloud in terms of development of new services?

Our Cloud Platform approach is based on IaaS VMs and IBM’s RedHat OpenShift and combines the power and flexibility of both technologies. We also use other tools that can accelerate our cloud journey, such as IBM Cloud Paks which offer enterprise-grade, full-stack cloud solutions to reduce development times and operational expenses.

Using OpenShift sits in the heart of our modernisation strategy as it provides a faster and more reliable way to build, move and manage all aspects of our cloud journey. In addition, IBM Cloud Paks provide a complete and consistent experience to speed up the development of applications built for Kubernetes. We will therefore continue to focus on enhancing our existing applications with IBM’s integrated tools while also developing new, cloudnative applications that deliver faster deployment in any cloud environment.

What specific workloads are being supported or benefiting from IBM hybrid cloud solutions?

Our OpenShift workloads can scale across data centers delivering native cloud-ready solutions. At the same time, we can uniformly monitor, log, and secure our apps. Because the OCP Platform helps us to manage these services, we can place a greater emphasis focusing on innovation and data with IBM Middleware, such as readiness for AI and analytics. We also have access to RedHat’s packaged open-source tools, runtimes, frameworks, databases, and more, which all helps us with innovation.

This has supported the bank with its digitalisation journey, and particularly with mobile banking, ADIB Chatbot and internet banking solutions for customers. Our investment has undoubtedly paid off as it represents an ideal solution for both cloud-native organisations and large enterprises with complex legacy applications that require modernisation.

Besides cost flexibility and scalability, what are the other key benefits you have achieved with this implementation?

We are realising significant benefits from the implementation of these technologies including shorter product development cycles, more agile innovation, and faster response to market changes, such as COVID-19.

It has also supported better integration with FinTech partners and third-parties to deliver a fresh customer experience. Examples of this include our Chatbots, as well as the modernisation of our mobile app and internet banking platform.

We have also benefited from cost savings by retiring our legacy infrastructure as we migrate workloads to a hybrid cloud model. All in all, it has improved operations within the bank as well as enhancing the quality of service we can deliver to our customers.