CUTTING DATA COSTS

摘要

Nationwide Building Society has undergone a total revamp of its IT infrastructure as part of a company-wide IT consolidation exercise. The three elements of the project were the company's servers, communications and storage facilities, which each have both unique and overlapping business drivers. For storage the business drivers were clear. Like many organisations, Nationwide is experiencing a huge growth in the volume of data. As a large financial institution it is also affected by regulatory legislation, such as Basel 2, which increases the amount of information the business is required to generate and store. The development of online banking has had a dramatic effect on data volumes. Nationwide was the first to offer online banking in the UK in 1997, says Arthur Amos, head of IT support at Nationwide. Whether banking is conducted over the internet or by phone it means more transactions more of the time - and they all need recording. "A customer can do three or four transactions in an evening rather than queue up in a branch," says Amos.