FeaturesOutsourcingData management

Following the success of running the entire bank's core production accounting system on PeopleSoft ERP, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) in 2007 adopted Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to consolidate and share its 300 databases in a private cloud environment for its businesses in Australia.

Founded in 1911 by the Australian government, the Sydney-based Commonwealth Bank of Australia was fully privatized in 1996, and is one of the 'big four' Australian banks today -- along with National Australia Bank, ANZ and Westpac Bank. As a provider of various financial services, the multinational bank is now operating its businesses across New Zealand, Fiji, Asia, USA and the UK.

Working with about 300 small to medium database applications, CBA needed to find a way to centrally manage its database systems on a consistent and standardized platform. This required a consolidation of its many individual databases onto a single platform, to be managed by a dedicated team of operational database administrators.

Through the whole database consolidation exercise, CBA expected to significantly reduce its number of servers and the associated operational charges.

In 2007, CBA adopted a database sharing service called Oracle as a Service (OaaS) platform, and consolidated its database applications onto three grids.

CBA subsequently implemented a private cloud computing infrastructure to run multiple workloads on the same shared infrastructure, with the purchase and implementation of servers inside their own data center, on a shared basis. 

In 2010, CBA expanded its efforts in centralized resource management, and implemented a range of PaaS offerings: self-service platform provisioning, on-demand platform provisioning, mass standardization, better utilization of computing resources, utility chargeback models. 

"Indeed CBA did not just buy any server and storage but bought Oracle Exadata, which is Oracle's recommended Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering for database, pre-integrated and deeply optimized by Oracle. And they've taken an existing application, which was never written for the cloud, an application that knew nothing about the cloud," said Roland Slee, vice president of product management, Oracle Asia Pacific and Japan.

According to Slee, Oracle's Exadata provides "a fully encrypted database with an extremely low-level of overhead, because we're leveraging encryption technology that is embedded into the processors, the CPUs in the underlying servers."

As for data security concerns, Slee said the cloud is actually a more secure way to manage one's data than the traditional way. "When you have 50 databases to manage, it's very hard to have the time to do a good job of managing every one of them individually. But when you consolidate databases -- and you typically have a very professional team focussed on this shared environment -- then security is typically much better managed," he said.