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CTO Tony Kerrison is moving the bank's IT infrastructure to the cloud, and he'd like you to join him.
November 30
Amsterdam-based ING Group has gone public with a plan to build hybrid cloud data centers with HP and Colt.
"We've come to the realization that building out our own data centers is a thing of the past, it's a waste of time and energy to build out the brick and mortar of the data center," says Steve Van Wyk, CIO of ING.
ING CTO Tony Kerrison spoke with Bank Technology News late last year about the bank's hybrid cloud strategy, in which private and public cloud components will intermingle in data centers that are shared with other banks (Kerrison has since moved to Bank of America). This week the bank
The new data centers will be focused on consuming cloud services. ING will be the anchor tenant and other companies including financial institutions will be invited to join.
ING originally purchased land in the Netherlands and in Belgium on which it planned to build its own data centers. "We started down that path, then we realized we really needed to find a partnership," Van Wyk says.
Colt will build the data center facility and the modular units that will go within it. HP has been asked to consolidate existing ING technology infrastructure and applications into a hybrid cloud setting using HP Cloud Computing Solutions. The design is meant to be open so the hardware won't be limited to HP equipment.
ING is hoping this partnership will help it reduce market time, transition from an asset owner and operator to a consumer of cloud services with a more flexible cost structure, gain scalability and only pay for capacity as needed, standardize IT and reduce risk.
In its broader data center strategy, ING is consolidating 16 data centers four data centers by 2014 and ultimately to two data centers.
As a part of its move to cloud-based operations, ING will migrate utility applications, such as desktop services, some 2,500 business applications and ultimately business processes to new robust industry standard service offerings.
