Banco Angolano de Investimentos (BAI), the premier full-service financial institution in Angola serving greater than 1,500,000 retail and company clients, has taken daring steps to modernise its know-how infrastructure, enabling it to satisfy the more and more digital calls for of its rising buyer base.
Deciding on VMware NSX Knowledge Middle and VMware vRealize, Banco BAI has reclaimed its IT infrastructure and embraced a cloud-first, and digital-centric method, permitting it to raised serve clients with trendy banking purposes.
Companies throughout Angola face a number of challenges past their management, akin to instability in energy and communications provide, a sluggish world provide chain, and lengthy lead occasions to amass and safe new applied sciences. This usually results in firms making their know-how investments outlast their urged lifespan, resulting in a drop in customer support whereas hampering an IT crew’s skill to innovate, which is what BAI got down to keep away from.
“Our challenges do not simply relate to legacy infrastructure or know-how. We need to proceed as a world-class financial institution so we’d like a basis that may help the tempo of innovation that we’ve got set ourselves and take away our reliance on third-party sources like energy and communications,” says Paulo Domingos, info techniques architect, BAI. “To be extra agile, our IT crew must shift from responding to day by day emergencies to a value-based function the place we will predict the longer term and help the enterprise by delivering industry-relevant options and purposes to completely different groups.”
Whereas BAI outpaced a lot of its African counterparts by deploying a VMware digital setting greater than ten years in the past, growing old {hardware} lastly caught up with its skill to carry out efficient catastrophe restoration. Moreover, failover to a secondary website would lead to an extended downtime. This was hampering the crew’s skill to modernise its techniques, turn into self-sufficient, and embrace digital transformation.
After investing in a full inner high quality evaluation of its techniques – the BAI IT crew constructed an infrastructure technique to reply the financial institution’s rapid and future enterprise wants, take again management of its know-how budgeting processes, and permit it to construct revolutionary digital banking options.
The system BAI designed permits it to learn from the abstraction capabilities of a software-defined knowledge centre (SDDC) that helps elasticity, flexibility, reliability, stability and automation. Finally it chosen VMware NSX Knowledge Middle for its SDDC and absolutely virtualized community for storage and servers whereas utilizing VMware vRealize Suite to help the visibility and administration of its SDDC.
“We’re extra snug as a crew and may focus our efforts on operational areas the place we’ve got essentially the most influence and implement clear objectives supported by lifelike KPIs whereas rolling out new techniques and purposes for the enterprise. It’s a system that’s not simply working for us at the moment however permits us to look to the longer term and visualise how we will use know-how to distinguish our price proposition and develop revolutionary services. Sure, this can be via bespoke utility growth, and sure, will probably be within the cloud,” says Domingos.
“BAI has been an unimaginable buyer to work with. The IT crew is forward-thinking and takes a daring method. Nothing may cease them after they got down to embrace a digital-centric view of innovation. The result’s that they now have an setting that helps the enterprise and delivers on its want to remain on prime of the banking sector in Angola. And it’s one they’ve full management of – it’s actually outstanding,” says Lorna Hardie, regional director at VMware Sub-Saharan Africa.