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<\/p>\nThe Commonwealth Bank has moved more than a decades\u2019 worth of financial data into the cloud in a bid to further rationalise its on-premises systems and accelerate take-up of AI.<\/p>\n
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The data had steadily accumulated in its on-premises data visualisation platform Tableau during the last 12 years.<\/p>\n
However,\u00a0CBA principal technology product owner Pooja Sharma said that the on-premises deployment became an impediment to meeting internal demand for\u00a0AI-driven analytics and was recently retired in favour of a cloud-based version of the application managed by the software\u2019s supplier, Salesforce.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were dealing with a highly complex [on-premises] environment which had multiple operational overheads, high numbers of incidents, vulnerabilities, ageing infrastructure, increasing cost of ownership, performance issues and so on.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the business end, we were seeing fragmented deployments across multiple sites and multiple domains \u2013 that was another problem. At the same time, we were also seeing a great demand for real-time insights and AI-driven analytics.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a big shift in business expectation, which was transitioning from earlier just reporting and visualisation to now decision intelligence.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe question really wasn\u2019t if you modernised or migrated, it was really \u2018how fast can we do it while managing risk?\u2019\u201d Sharma said.<\/p>\n
The migration gives the bank the ability to access its data through Salesforce’s AI-powered analytics application, Pulse, which is only available in the cloud due to its need for large amounts of computing power.<\/p>\n
It also lets the bank use the generative AI companion Tableau Agent without the need to make its own arrangements to access large language models (LLMs).<\/p>\n
However, according to Salesforce’s online documentation Tableau Agent’s LLM is set by the software maker’s developers.<\/a><\/p>\n The bank said that the migration had alleviated it of the infrastructure burden it was shouldering to serve Tableau to more than 25,000 users and shortened average dashboard loading times by 33 percent \u2013 bringing them down to less than five seconds in 76 percent of cases.<\/p>\n Adoption of the analytics platform had also increased. The bank recorded a 52 percent increase in dashboard views and a 36 percent jump in use of Tableau workflows.<\/p>\n CBA has been vocal and active about its ongoing transition to cloud computing, with strong backing coming directly from the bank\u2019s chief executive, Matt Comyn.<\/p>\n In 2020, at the company\u2019s half-year results presentation, Comyn announced that the bank had set a target to increase its base of applications and services hosted in public cloud from 25 percent to 95 percent.<\/p>\n At the time, Comyn said that it was the bank\u2019s \u201clargest digital transformation in five years\u201d.<\/a><\/p>\n Comyn did not set a clear timeframe to reach the target at the time. However, in late 2021 the bank revealed<\/a> that the migration was starting to reach scale with the establishment of three special-purpose \u201cexecution factories\u201d.<\/p>\n At the time, it said that it hoped the application re-hosting factories would allow the bank push two-thirds of its computing workloads into public cloud by mid-2022 with an expectation that it would meet the 95 percent target within five years.<\/p>\n