Old Mutual shifts IT infrastructure to AWS Cloud Platform

Pan-African financial services group Old Mutual has shifted its IT infrastructure to the AWS cloud and closed its on-premises data centre facilities, becoming one of the first South African companies of its size to do so.

This move to Amazon Web Services is expected to allow Old Mutual to “accelerate innovation, reduce IT infrastructure costs and harness machine learning to deliver more personalised customer experiences” AWS revealed in a statement on Wednesday.

AWS is currently the world’s largest cloud computing provider. Old Mutual has moved its banking, insurance and wealth management systems to the cloud, and in the process reducing the average time taken to process financial transactions by two-thirds.

AWS also mentioned that the move accelerate innovation, at a time of global economic uncertainty, by reducing the time required for new application testing from months to minutes. The full shift to the AWS included moving more than 2 000 on-premises servers, 215 applications, 1 786 databases and more than 500 websites.

“Old Mutual will use AWS capabilities to better anticipate customer needs and develop the next generation of financial products and experiences. The company will leverage AWS ML and generative artificial intelligence (AI) services—including Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service to build, train and deploy ML models—to generate real-time, personalised financial forecasting and recommendations for customers.”

The company said that the single, consistent view of customers provided by Information Fabric enables individualised recommendations and more seamless, intuitive customer experiences, which includes combined client rewards programmes that enable points earned in one area of the business to be redeemed through another.

Acting CIO for Old Mutual said: “Daily server outages, disconnected financial products, ballooning on-premises costs – those are all challenges we leave behind as we go all-in on AWS.”