AYA Bank improves efficiency and cuts TCO 55% with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

With more than 3.2 million customers and 265 branches, AYA Bank is the second largest private bank in Myanmar. The bank aims to enable financial growth and enrich the lives of its customers via comprehensive banking and finance services.

However, the bank had difficulty keeping pace with the banking sector’s constant digital transformation due to its massive, costly, and hard to scale on-premises IT landscape. The result was slow time to market, challenges in scaling features, and higher operating and maintenance costs.

After upgrading its core Finastra banking application, the bank’s on-premises environment ran out of capacity to host the VMware Training Environment for the app. The bank saw significant challenges in modernizing the legacy environment, including the cost, time, and effort needed to achieve continuous improvements with new features.

AYA Bank also wanted the same level of security, control, and user experience as its on-premises VMware environment. It wanted the same ease and agility of management and provisioning to maintain business continuity.

After evaluating a variety of cloud and other on-premises options, AYA Bank selected Oracle Cloud VMware Solution because the platform could function as an extension of the bank’s on-premises environment. It would allow the bank’s IT teams to move workloads faster and significantly improve time to market. Oracle Cloud VMware on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) could also offer the bank root privileges, a critical requirement that only Oracle would meet.

In addition, partnering with Oracle would mean that the bank could continue running its environment with the same tools and user experience, requiring no retraining. Also, the bank could repurpose its recurring tech support fees to Oracle Cloud Services to further reduce operational costs. Migrating with Oracle Cloud Lift Services gave the bank even more confidence to choose Oracle.

Oracle drew on its financial services and cloud expertise to build a highly scalable, secure, and resilient infrastructure based on Oracle Cloud VMware. The new landscape has provided AYA Bank with the extra capacity needed to roll out the training environment, which has maximized returns on the core banking application investment.

Now the bank can move workloads into the cloud in less than 3 hours while keeping its security credentials intact. Using Oracle Cloud VMware to deploy new environments instead of scaling legacy on-premises infrastructure has reduced AYA Bank’s TCO by 55%.

With the cloud service nearly identical to the existing on-premises VMware environment, the bank requires no new tools or application modifications to manage operational activity. AYA Bank can maintain continuity with existing tools, processes, and policies while enjoying the ease of management, scalability, security, and full administrative permissions, including root access.

OCVS offers 156 cores, which is the highest CPU core count available for any VMware-based solution in the market today, allowing AYA Bank to provision for future workloads. Moving VMware workloads to Oracle is also helping the bank free up on-premises capacity for other critical workloads.

Through these transformations, the bank can increase operational efficiency significantly. Provisioning has become 1440X faster, drastically reducing the time to provision from months to a few hours.

The digital transformation and modernization of its IT environment has positioned AYA Bank for enduring success with greater potential to generate business insights and valuable service opportunities.