About Customer

National Australia Bank (NAB) is one of Australia’s largest financial institutions, serving over 9 million customers across the country. Established over 50 years ago, NAB is committed to helping communities prosper and serving customers with integrity and innovation. As part of its mission to improve financial outcomes for customers, NAB has embraced a comprehensive digital transformation strategy, focusing on enhancing the developer experience, increasing cloud adoption, and optimizing software delivery processes.

Challenge

Nab has over 7,000 employees and a complex, multi-cloud environment involving both AWS and Azure. To become a technical-first company, NAB faced several technical challenges:

• Build Failures and Slow Release Cycles: As the organization scaled its software delivery processes, frequent build failures and inefficiencies in the CI/CD pipeline were slowing down development cycles.
• Developer Toil: Developers were spending too much time on repetitive tasks like debugging and troubleshooting build failures instead of focusing on high-value work.
• Governance and Compliance: NAB needed to ensure strict governance and regulatory compliance in its software delivery processes, particularly as it moved to a cloud-first strategy.‍
• Cloud Migration: NAB was in the process of migrating more workloads to the cloud and needed a solution that could integrate with multiple cloud providers, enabling more flexibility and reducing the risk of vendor lock-in.

Solution

NAB turned to Harness, a key partner in their technology strategy, to address these challenges and accelerate its journey towards greater developer efficiency and cloud adoption. NAB is currently working with Harness Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery & GitOps. The relationship between NAB and Harness began three years ago as a small pilot, and it has since grown into a highly productive partnership.

“With Harness, at National Australia Bank we've really been able to improve our governance framework. We've been able to build governance in as code and provide guide rails to our developers so that they're not encumbered with a whole lot of toil. ”
Steve Day, CTO

Results

With Harness, NAB has seen significant improvements to the overall business, including:

• 67% Reduction in Build Failures: By improving the CI/CD pipeline, NAB was able to reduce the frequency of build failures, leading to faster and more reliable software releases.
• 85% Improvement in Troubleshooting Efficiency: With enhanced instrumentation and better logging, developers were able to resolve issues much faster, improving productivity and reducing downtime.
• Faster Time to Market: The overall optimization of the build, test, and deploy processes allowed NAB to deliver new features and updates to customers at a faster pace.
• Improved Developer Satisfaction: By reducing toil and enabling developers to focus on high-value tasks, NAB saw improved morale and productivity across its technology teams.
• Enhanced Compliance and Governance: Harness’ governance-as-code approach allowed NAB to maintain strict regulatory compliance without compromising agility, supporting their journey to the cloud.