Santander and Google offer tech to help businesses smooth move to cloud

Google Cloud and Spanish bank Santander have developed a service that promises to help businesses across industry sectors migrate legacy systems to the cloud.

Dual Run, as it is known, will be a service from Google built on top of Santander technology, known as Gravity.

The Spanish bank is itself currently using the service as it migrates systems to the cloud as part of its digital transformation.

In May, Santander revealed that it had set 2023 as the target to have 100% of its infrastructure cloud-based. At the time, it said it had been moving 200 servers to the cloud every working day.

Using its own software, known as Gravity, the bank is moving systems to a cloud platform built using in-house resources and third-party providers.

Dirk Marzluf, group chief operating and technology officer at Banco Santander, said migrating from legacy infrastructure to modern technology is a key challenge for banks and many other industries. “Dual Run for Google Cloud, which leverages the innovation we’ve developed in-house at Santander, will be critical for the digital transformation of many companies and is a testament to the outstanding technology built by our teams,” he said.

Sachin Gupta, vice-president and general manager of infrastructure at Google Cloud, said: “Santander’s revolutionary innovation has helped us built a new service in record time.”

Santander’s Gravity, bespoke in-house-developed software, allows parallel processing, with workloads on its existing mainframe and on the cloud. This enables real-time testing with no business.

The bank said the move to cloud will “allow easier and faster access to data, more simplicity and faster time to market, making it possible to deliver new capabilities in hours, instead of days, and more frequent app updates”.

It said the bank will also be able to use real-time analytics to provide better products and services, while the high cost of running the core banking platform system will be reduced, including a 70% cut in energy costs.