ING Direct's Simon Andrews was named iTnews CIO of the Year last night for a major IT overhaul, including a project migrating the bank's core banking systems onto a Microsoft, NetApp and Cisco private cloud.
Andrews leaned on the three technology vendors as well as systems integrator Dimension Data to implement this major transformation of the bank's IT backend.
According to iTnews, Andrews stood out for the ambition and innovation that he showed in a gutsy overhaul of his company's entire IT infrastructure.
Dubbed 'Zero Touch', the overhaul included a highly ambitious effort by Andrews' team to transfer its entire computing, network and storage infrastructure into a private cloud over one weekend, and brutally replatform or replace every technology running the bank in the process.
This project was based around key technologies included Microsoft FastTrack reference architecture, Cisco and Netapp's FlexPod converged infrastructure and Cisco Virtualised Multiservice Data Centre (VMDC), to offer ING Direct high availability and high resiliency, with no single point of failure and running in an "active-active" fashion.
Dimension Data solutions architect Chris Waddington said that after "a number of successful dry runs, we geared up with Dimension Data, Microsoft, Cisco and NetApp, we shut the bank down on Friday night; 24 hours later the bank was live".
Andrews received the gong at the annual iTnews Benchmark Awards last night, in front of a crowd of IT executives at Melbourne’s Grand Hyatt.
The 2015 The Benchmark Awards included some of the country’s largest organisations; CIOs from the likes of Rio Tinto and the University of Melbourne took out other categories. The awards are judged by a panel of iTnews staff and CIOs.
Andrews told CRN that the award was “fantastic recognition for the team and a great validation of IT being central to a company's value proposition, not simply a service provider”.
Check out Dimension Data's video case study below:
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