Bendigo and Adelaide Bank gears up for move to the cloud

One of Australia's better known community banks, the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, plans to train about 700 of its staff through a cloud workforce training program before the end of the year as it prepares for a migration of its services to the cloud.

A statement from the bank said it had more than two million customers across the country and had decided on moving to an AWS platform in 2020.

Under the plan, Digital applications, customer-facing websites and open banking services are all to be migrated to AWS.

The bank said it had worked with AWS Training and Certification to train its staff, with a month-long training program to train them on foundational and intermediate cloud topics, such as cloud essentials, architecting, and developing.

Following this program, which saw more than 50% of developers trained, there was an accelerated “32 apps in 30 days” migration program, which was "designed to get the bank migrating workloads into AWS at scale".
Lauren Benedict, Cloud Community Lead, the bank attempted to boost the program with the launch of an AWS Skills Guild.

“Following the success of the initial training effort, the AWS Skills Guild team worked with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to design ’Unleash,’ which aims to invest in our people and unleash their potential through building cloud confidence,” she said.

The Skills Guild program began in June and will run till the end of the year.

“Training for both our technical and non-technical staff is crucial, because it facilitates collaboration between technical and business teams, and creates a common understanding of cloud. With cloud-fluent business professionals, we can collaborate effectively and contribute to our organisational objectives,” said Benedict.

Katie Sim, senior manager Operations and Productivity, who participated in one of the first formal training classes as part of "Unleash", said: “Cloud services are — and will continue to be — an integral part of achieving the Bank’s transformation goals.

“This training will help upskill all staff regardless of role or previous levels of exposure to cloud technology. The content is really useful in helping understand cloud fundamentals, the benefits, and how the technology is used to keep our customer data secure.

"All areas of the business are key to the advancement of our cloud strategy on some level and as a result, it’s important our people are familiar with, and understand the cloud-based environment.

“This responsibility extends far beyond just technology roles as knowledge of the cloud, its uses and the advanced control environment it can provide, is vital when evaluating key business decisions.

"Given the sheer number of service configurations available on a cloud platform, it is critical business stakeholders understand the tools available to support workloads moving to the cloud, which in turn, will help instill confidence in the effectiveness, design, and operation of required controls."