Business challenge story

Lack of computing resources

HBL is on a mission to transform itself into “a technology company with a banking license,”
and become globally recognized for its technological advancements and digital innovations.
If business growth is any indication of success, the banking giant is well on its way.
Attracting customers at this magnitude requires delivering groundbreaking products and
services in addition to building advanced solutions for business and operations. To this end
and to support its IT initiatives, HBL maintains an extensive IT environment that consists of
on-premises sites for production, high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR). 
Until recently, the Bank also ran an in-house testing and development environment but found
it challenging to maintain the necessary infrastructure.
Imtiaz Mahmood, Head of IT Infrastructure and Operations, Global, at HBL, elaborates: “Our
business model is to develop initiatives that let us take the lead as a first mover in the market,
but we couldn’t do that because of certain challenges on the test and development side.”
For instance, an initiative for a branchless banking platform required end-to-end testing and
development environments. Other projects that focused on the organization’s massive ATM
network required improving infrastructure security and testing solutions in production before
going live. “It was a big challenge to establish this kind of infrastructure in parallel to our
production support,” says Mr. Mahmood.
A chronic shortage of computing resources compounded the problem. When new or
important workloads required additional infrastructure resources or when HBL wanted to test
new applications, it often needed to buy new physical servers and storage devices. The
process, which involved procuring, delivering, installing and configuring the technology,
could take 4 – 6 weeks due to import factors and associated delays. 
Alternatively, the development teams or the application vendors had to be provisioned with
resources from the existing test and development pool, or from deprovisioned resources at the
HA site. This was highly risky. “For every other integration, there has to be a platform
available to us to complete the testing lifecycle,” adds Mr. Mahmood.
Recognizing that its testing and developing issues jeopardized innovation and growth, HBL
sought to outsource the environment and take advantage of cloud technology.