How Bank BPD Bali modernised its datacentre infrastructure

Banks that are driving digital transformation efforts are often held back by legacy monolithic infrastructure that is complex, difficult to maintain and lack the agility needed to keep up with the disruptions in the financial services industry.

This has led many banks to modernise their datacentres, effectively turning them into software-defined datacentres and private clouds through virtualisation and hyper-converged infrastructure.

Bank BPD Bali, an Indonesian bank with small and medium-sized enterprise customers in Bali and the West Nusa Tenggara region, did just that.

It recently deployed the Nutanix Cloud Platform to ensure its databases could achieve a high level of performance in compliance with government regulations and to deliver reliable and quality services for customers, according to Ida Bagus Gede Setia Yasa (Gusde), operational director at Bank BPD Bali.

The platform is also hosting the bank’s applications, which have been developed with a legacy model. These include transactional applications, such as mobile banking and tax payment, as well as non-transactional ones such as human resource management and data warehouses.

Despite some technical challenges in implementing the Nutanix platform on its physical servers, the bank was able to integrate its systems with ease, said Gusde, crediting the “strategic collaboration” between Bank BPD Bali’s internal team and Multipolar Technology, a local systems integrator.

With the Nutanix platform in place, Bank BPD Bali has been able to drive digital innovations, including e-ticketing services at tourist spots in Bali, digital cashiers at restaurants and the adoption of Indonesia’s QR code standard to facilitate customer transactions. “As we advance further into a digital-first era, cloud computing will play an integral role in driving our digitisation efforts and ensuring that we remain competitive in a dynamic and ever-evolving financial services landscape,” said Gusde.

While the bank is currently using cloud-based infrastructure services for the application programming interface of its e-ticketing and digital cashier services, Gusde said it does not operate a hybrid cloud environment for now.

“But our partnership with Nutanix has been a game-changer for the bank, which has led us to consider the adoption of hybrid multi-cloud in the future,” he added. “With our broader ambitions to enhance our digital banking services and bolster Bali’s growing digital ecosystem, we are contemplating the possibility of leveraging new solutions like the Nutanix Kubernetes Engine.”

Meanwhile, the Nutanix platform has also reaped operational gains for the bank. For example, it has been able to switch over from its primary datacentre to a disaster recovery site that involved critical services and urgent transactions in just four hours, said Gusde.

It also achieved a 15-minute recovery point objective with 99.9% uptime and increased the IT team’s productivity by 70%. This has enabled the bank to focus more on strategic areas of its business instead of daily maintenance, as well as slashed its datacentre footprint by 70%.

“Overall, the adoption of the Nutanix Cloud Platform has made it possible for us to better support the bank’s evolving needs with an agile and easily scalable IT infrastructure,” said Gusde.

“This is crucial in enabling us to stay nimble, retain our competitive edge and capture more opportunities in the changing market – ultimately, positioning us well to support the development of Bali’s digital ecosystem and contribute to Indonesia’s economic recovery,” he concluded.