LAST UPDATE: 26/07/2021

At Grupo Santander, we’re undergoing digital transformation to bolster our service proposition to our customers and teams. The Optimized Hosting Environment (OHE) platform we’ve created ramps up our cloud adoption, having already migrated 60% of our global IT infrastructure. 

Thanks to our exciting digitalization journey with employees and customers, we’ve migrated more IT infrastructure to the cloud than any other large European bank. 

Making headway with our cloud programme

Our cloud adoption project is one of the fastest in the world. It is helping us establish a common technology architecture faster in a way that is consistent with our strategic priorities: simplification and modernization of infrastructure, and the rollout of software developments to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and time to market.

We’re working to put in place a platform that provides the best of both worlds: a hybrid of private (OHE) and public clouds.

What have we achieved? We’ve moved more than 60% of the group’s servers to the cloud in the last 18 months, opening the door in record time to remote working for many of our teams; critical business applications in the cloud; and simpler, standard management. What’s more, our cloud platform enhances customer experience thanks to cutting-edge technology that translates into innovative, customer-focused services and applications, not to mention faster response times.

What is OHE?

It’s a more flexible, scalable and secure cloud platform that helps establish a common technology architecture and speed up cloud adoption within the group. It standardizes software architecture and development so we can rapidly enable cloud solutions and run native digital applications in both public and private clouds.

Benefits for the bank and our customers

OHE boosts all our processes. It enables us to use cutting-edge technologies to create high-value services. Most importantly, we can use it to design a long chain of links that traditionally involved a high number of iterations and dependencies.

It also affords us countless benefits such as reducing operational risk and eliminating hardware obsolescence without increasing costs. It gives us the option to store work on the public or private cloud based on such factors as security and performance in order to choose the best solution. It offers greater profitability, simplification and standardization, together with high energy efficiency and a readily-available cloud infrastructure that is more flexible, more secure and risk-free for the customer. As a result, our customers may benefit from a common technological architecture; a shared model with a common infrastructure, platform and processes; and self-consumption on Marketplace and application programming interfaces (APIs), which can speed up technology adoption and uniformity. 

Thanks to OHE, we can unite as a global group with a multi-country solution on a single platform.

Our goals for 2021

Our cloud adoption and the inroads we’ve made in our digital transformation (automation and use of the Agile framework) mean our people and processes have adapted very quickly to innovative technologies. 

We want to continue moving in this direction and aim to complete our cloud migration by 2023 to become a fully digitally-enabled bank that delivers world-class, digital services supported by experts at branches. 

What path will we follow towards this end? Over the course of this year we want to increase the total volume of deployments to Production using ALM Multicloud by 100%, as well as accelerate the deployment of Public Cloud solutions and new OHE products, and achieve the ambitious savings and efficiency targets associated with the execution of the Cloud adoption strategy.

ALM & CaaS, the key to improving productivity and delivering 

In order to bring products to market as quickly as possible, without losing sight of such important issues as security, traceability and efficiency, the Technology & Operations teams have opted for products ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) and CaaS (Container as a Service).

Our customers cannot wait for new functionalities or services and this global solution allows us to provide the best service to more than 15 Group entities in more than 10 countries.

At Santander we work with high-performance teams prepared to innovate and deliver new functionalities to the business using the Cloud (both public and private), meeting the deadlines demanded by customers and always bearing in mind the regulatory framework in order to protect the infrastructure, applications and data.

In this way, we underline our ability as a global bank to focus on innovation, while our corporate culture advocates continuous training and the implementation of state-of-the-art methodologies.