Portugal bank Millennium bcp has selected Cisco cloud computing technology to help optimise data centre resources required to support application development, simplify data centre management and reduce total cost of ownership while increasing business agility and productivity.
With Cisco cloud computing technology, the development team will be able to decrease the application time to market for new services.
Millennium bcp will work in an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model and it will be able to increase agility in its business, reach scalability levels, offer flexible services and make efficient use of energy, physical space, and the total cost of investment.
In adittion, the development team will be able to use IaaS for each new application. With this approach they will use standardised hardware and software pre-negotiated without the need of using the procurement department for every single process. With this model, customers can implement a self-service model and users can change agreements for support and recovery service levels if necessary.
The new offering allows users to share the same infrastructure, network or storage resources without compromising vulnerable information. The offering allows Millennium bcp to have a more adequate cost management, while improving the response to the development team through a better usage of resources and provisioning.
Millennium bcp adopts a cloud-based model, based on Portugal Telecom’s cloud infrastructure and the Millennium bcp will use a private cloud model.
Portugal Telecom collaborated with Cisco to design and build its underlying cloud computing infrastructure, based on a brand new-data centre.
Millennium bcp CIO Carlos Alves said Millennium bcp expects to change some of its organisation foundational principles.
"We trust this will serve as a benchmark for improving operations, bringing increased agility and flexibility to the bank, while helping control costs. It will also release internal resources from commoditized tasks, allowing Millennium bcp’s employees to focus on the core business," said Alves.
Cisco Data Centres and UCS director Wendy Mars said the data center is constantly evolving to meet employee expectations for accessing networks, applications and information anywhere at any time with any device.
"Cisco’s approach to infrastructure allows for this change and the delivery of new, not-yet-enabled services. With the announcement of this project, Millennium bcp is taking a pioneering step forward by embracing new technology such as virtualization, cloud computing, desktop virtualization and a unified data center infrastructure, which will see a number of benefits, including economic efficiencies, differentiation from competitors and crucially, being able to meet their employee expectations while simultaneously helping to meet their own business goals," said Mars.
