Amazon Web Services, part of Amazon.com, has announced that the transnational financial institution Bancolombia is expanding its relationship with AWS, selecting it as its strategic cloud partner with plans to migrate 100% of its applications to the world’s leading cloud. As part of a new agreement, Bancolombia will move the majority of its IT infrastructure to AWS, and it expects to reduce its IT infrastructure costs by approximately 60%. For the last three years, Bancolombia has modernized and transformed its digital channels and applications, such as ‘Bancolombia a la Mano’ on AWS to improve the banking experience for its more than 20 million individual and corporate customers in Colombia, Panama, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, the Cayman Islands, Peru and Guatemala. So far, the bank has migrated its SAP workloads and more than 90 applications to AWS and created 180 new applications natively in the cloud. The bank is leveraging AWS’s global infrastructure and a broad portfolio of cloud capabilities, including analytics, databases, storage and security, to lower costs and improve its operational efficiency. In addition, the financial institution’s top management is investing in cloud computing skills development for its employees to accelerate the company’s Digital Transformation.
The relationship between the two companies began in 2015, when Nequi, the first digital bank in Colombia, part of Grupo Bancolombia, was created. Following a period of success in 2018, Bancolombia decided to open a new management team in charge of leading its Digital Transformation process. It considered the adoption of cloud services a priority. Thus, using AWS services, the financial institution successfully migrated applications, including the SAP software’s planning resources, to the cloud. Bancolombia is using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a managed relational database service, to develop scalable applications that meet the company’s internal needs. Thanks to this tool, the bank can free itself from arduous and time-consuming administrative tasks. In addition, the bank currently uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to take advantage of container technology in an immersive way and can control the newly created containers. To date, the bank has dozens of EKS clusters, which enable it to provide more security and higher availability by automating key tasks such as patching, node provisioning and updates.