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Absa achieves profit of control

Published • 29 July 2020

Absa Group Limited, formerly Barclays Africa Group Limited, and originally Amalgamated Banks of South Africa, is an African based financial services group, offering personal and business banking, credit cards, corporate and investment banking, wealth and investment management as well as bancassurance. ABSA is moving towards data-driven decision-making, but one of its major pain points is that it still does not have a single view of its infrastructure. The bank had configuration data that existed across three different CMDBs migrating onto a single platform, and multiple Security and Technology tools providing data of the estate (network access, patching, endpoint protection). One of the burning questions asked to CIOs is, “What does our risk posture look like”, which can only be answered when its disparate systems can be viewed as a single source.

The Challenge

Absa, a leading bank in South Africa, has thousands of workloads operating in and migrating to the cloud. Teams are able to build and operate workloads with relative autonomy which provide speed and efficient development. However, maintaining a single overview of the risk posture of all these workloads can be difficult.

The Solution

The solution was to provide a cost-effective platform to store and process estate data (using Athena and Glue) that give a single view to determine the company’s risk posture. This assisted the up skilling of Absa data analysts to work in an AWS environment. The solution leverages bespoke configurations of AWS services such as Config, CloudTrail, and Lambdas that are orchestrated to allow the team to quickly prototype without the need to become experts on running and configuring tools like Spark, Hive and Hadoop. The integration of these services goes beyond the default security settings which provides a customised to fit application for the Absa team.

The Result

As a result, the Absa team now has a single view of their estate and secure status. From here they were able to use advanced data processing implementations and now have a solid understanding of their risk posture at an affordable cost. The AWS services used access to affordable storage allows the team to create a cost-effective data repository for trend analysis. Contact us to reap the benefits of our cloud solutions.