Executive Summary
After over 100 years in business, Itaú Unibanco is the largest bank in Brazil and Latin America, with operations worldwide serving about 55 million customers. Itaú Unibanco initially hosted all of its applications on its private cloud and distributed platform on-premise. However, the data center had limitations.
First, the legacy approach made updating Itaú Unibanco’s mobile application difficult, and the process could take months. After migration to Amazon instances supported by Intel® Xeon® processors, Itaú Unibanco could update its mobile app in as little as a day. Secondly, the bank wanted to make its applications more valuable and responsive to users. The AWS solution currently supports more than 70 million customers through Itaú Unibanco’s app, with the elasticity to grow with the company’s customer base. The migration improved customer experiences and helped Itaú Unibanco to reduce costs and increase profitability.
Challenge
Today, 100% of Itaú Unibanco’s customers can access all of the bank’s products and services through the app. Given the evolution in customers’ banking behavior, Itaú Unibanco’s team felt it was vital for the bank to digitally transform and modernize its applications to accommodate a growing customer base and differentiate itself in a competitive marketplace.
Itaú Unibanco’s platform modernization, using modern Intel® processors available on AWS, allowed the bank to optimize instance allocation, operational efficiency, and customer experience.
The bank initially hosted its applications on-premise, but the legacy environment deployment required a long time to install infrastructure and deploy new products and features. Itaú Unibanco needed to update applications rapidly to provide customers with the best experiences. The bank also hoped to reduce costs, increase profits, improve scalability, and gain operational efficiency by moving its distributed workloads to the cloud.
Solution
Working closely with Amazon, Intel, and other business stakeholders, Itaú Unibanco evaluated its applications and workloads to determine the optimal hosting environment. Proof-of-concept testing led to adopting Amazon EC2 Instances with underlying Intel Xeon processors. Itaú Unibanco migrated 99% of its private cloud and 20% of its distributed platform to AWS. Itaú Unibanco have moved the systems from 19,000 servers from their data center to AWS.
These changes helped Itaú Unibanco make application updates much faster and more efficiently. The Intel Xeon processors underlying the instances also accelerated workloads and cost-effectively improved end-user experiences. Plus, the deployment accommodated compliance with security rules outlined by NIST, ISO 27001, and CIS while providing Itaú Unibanco greater agility and scalability.
“Digital processes were necessary in diverse areas in the company, to solve many of the problems, with the goal to decrease business incidents, decrease costs, increase profits, and to increase customer experience. This decision brought solutions to address many issues, including opportunities to increase security, back-level applications, improve performance and scalability, and the agility to move to the cloud.” —Ellen Vasconcelos, Technology Manager, Itaú Unibanco
Within the Itaú Unibanco community of investment services, the bank interacts daily to evaluate opportunities to migrate on-premise platforms to the cloud, using the Replatform Journey.
Results
Itaú Unibanco has a platform called Tradops, defined in collaboration with the AWS Professional Services team. The bank has adopted an elastic platform with the capacity to grow and serve its customers. Currently, Itaú Unibanco can allow all customers to use its application. According to Itau, preparing infrastructure for launching new products now takes up to one day for customers, compared to the previous 120 days. It means a 99% reduction in platform delivery lead time. Itaú Unibanco also migrated and deactivated 99% of the private cloud and 20% of the distributed platform to AWS. Besides that, the bank could see at least a 3.5 times better performance improvement, comparing legacy servers based on the Intel® Xeon® E5 processor family to new AWS instances based on 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors.1
As a large financial institution, adding customer value is always a top goal. As one example, seventy-seven percent of our 15 million daily accesses depend on our mobile app. By moving to Amazon instances supported by Intel Xeon processors, we can update our app faster and enhance our customers’ banking experiences while reducing costs. —Marcelo Kendy, Technology Manager, Itaú Unibanco
As an example, the investment services community using the Replatform Migration Journey for the “BNDES Payments” application—and considering the ability to drive innovation, the need to improve operational efficiency, and the desire to optimize customer experience—could save Itaú Unibanco up to 99% in annual cost when comparing the on-premise environment to the modernized workload running in the cloud.
Besides, Itaú Unibanco could capture additional benefits by modernizing the application in the cloud, such as improving scalability and elasticity, creating a FinOps culture, and improving high availability and reliability, among others.
Key Takeaways
- Migrating legacy applications and workloads to the cloud can take significant time and planning, but the benefits of a digital transformation are enormous.
- By hosting applications in the cloud, Itaú Unibanco improved application performance and responsiveness for users. The move to Amazon EC2 instances with Intel Xeon processors also made updating applications much faster.
- Post-migration, Itaú Unibanco could update its mobile app in as little as a day.
