Turning boulders into pebbles: behind Westpac’s cloud journey

Westpac decided to increase its investment in Microsoft’s Azure cloud services platform earlier in 2022, to underpin the wholesale modernisation of the bank’s technology environment in a five-year deal to help drive the bank’s digital and hybrid multicloud strategy.

The move supports the goal to adopt a standard for all new systems at the bank, whether created by its own tech team or sourced from others, to be built to continuously change using evergreen cloud-native technologies, according to David Walker, Westpac Group chief technology officer.

It might come as a surprise that one of Australia’s largest banks, known for spending billions of dollars on its technology assets each year, is only now just beginning to shift its infrastructure to a more flexible, cloud-based arrangement. But the wholesale move to Azure is only the latest chapter in an ongoing program of change at Westpac, which already claimed a dual cloud environment, albeit one in which Amazon Web Services (AWS) had historically played host to the bulk of its cloud-based applications and services.

But this is changing, according to Walker, as the Microsoft Azure offering begins to meet and, in some cases, surpass the capabilities of AWS in certain areas.

“The most important part of this arrangement was to create an environment where software engineers make the decisions on where to put the right hosting of their technology, not based on costs, or based on project managers or finance decisions, but based on what the right technology is for the use case,” Walker tells CIO Australia.

Building a simpler tech environment

The bank had built up a lot of technology assets over the years, and the first challenge for Walker and his team when he came on board as group CTO in late 2019 was getting the foundational fundamentals of running the technology right.

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