UBS is stepping up its migration to the cloud, setting out plans to have more than 50% of its applications, including critical workloads, running on Microsoft Azure within five years.
The bank has expanded its deal with Microsoft, building on a 2018 agreement that involved a plan to move one-third of its applications to public cloud within four years.
This goal was achieved early and now the partnership goes beyond just consuming cloud services to include the co-development of innovations and greater collaboration in areas like carbon reduction.
Moving some technology platform workloads from its on-premises and private cloud servers to Azure has helped the bank slash energy consumption of these workloads by up to 30% to date.
The partners have also co-developed an open source Carbon Aware API, that provides recommendations on how to schedule workloads that require heavy compute power during times when clean, renewable or low-carbon sources of electricity are most available.
Mike Dargan, UBS chief digital and information officer, says: "Our cloud strategy has fundamentally changed the way we operate, allowing us to reinvigorate our technology estate and reimagine how we build applications for our clients.
"Closely partnering and collaborating with Microsoft has and will continue to create tremendous value for our clients, our employees, the firm and our shareholders. The developments and learnings that stem from this partnership will benefit the financial services industry and beyond."
Finextra has recently launched the inaugural Financial Cloud Summit, scheduled to take place on 2 March 2023. For more information and to register for this event, please visit the event page here.