ING Bank is moving its operations to the cloud for scalability, efficiency and security. 

The $967 billion bank’s operations are 63% on a private cloud, Marco Eijsackers, head of the CIO office at ING, told Bank Automation News.

“We started our migration to the cloud in 2014-15 in partnership with Microsoft by building private clouds,” Eijsackers said. “Back then, public cloud infrastructure was not so developed, which has matured over time, and now we are moving some of our operations from our private cloud to public clouds.” 

The Amsterdam-based bank will continue to keep some of its operations on its private cloud for e.g. efficiency and safety reasons, Eijsackers said, adding that public clouds are public clouds are now being added “to scale our technology platform.”

Some areas where ING operates, including the Netherlands and Belgium, are 100% cloud-native, while others, like Australia, are in the phase of migrating to the public cloud, Eijsackers said. 

ING also works with Google Cloud for data analytics as a part of a multi-cloud strategy, Eijsackers told BAN. 

A hybrid-cloud approach 

Many financial institutions like ING “adopt a private cloud infrastructure for enhanced security and compliance with regulatory standards,” Agustin Rubini, director analyst at think tank Gartner, told BAN.  

“The preference for private over public clouds among financial institutions primarily stems from the heightened control over sensitive data and operations, despite the higher costs associated with maintaining a dedicated private cloud,” Rubini said. 

While private cloud infrastructure gives more control to banks, “it’s important to note that advancements in public cloud technologies have also introduced robust security measures tailored for highly regulated industries,” Rubini said. 

The strategic use of hybrid clouds allows banks to use the best of both worlds — the public cloud’s scalability and cost-efficiency and the private cloud’s handling sensitive information, critical operations and legacy applications that require a higher degree of control and security, Rubini said. 

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