RBS looking towards virtualisation

RBS looking towards virtualisation

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has started to shift its systems towards a virtualised model, with the intention of lowering its annual technology spend.

At the moment, the bank is spending around £1.5 billion a year on technology, but all this could change if the roll-out of a virtual desktop platform is successful.

RBS started to implement the changes in October of last year after signing a deal with Fujitsu worth £240 million to move around 55,000 RBS users onto a desktop transformation platform. The main driving force behind the deal was for RBS to reduce its costs and offer employees the option of working from home. The end of support for Windows XP was also a factor behind the upgrade.

Mark Diamond, chief information officer at RBS, noted at a Citrix Synergy conference in Barcelona that it can be hard to help clients see that thin-client technology is good value when there has been so much invested in a legacy desktop estate previously.

Computer Weekly reported Mr Diamond as suggesting that the case for virtualisation needs to be presented with the business in mind. "The business doesn't care about tech jargon. The business does not understand technology," he remarked. "But it does understand that we need to change the way we work."

To ensure that the new system was as reliable as possible, Fujitsu implemented a design based on two data centres, so that in the case of one going down, users' desktops would be safely housed in the second location.

However, to get the most from virtualisation, a business will require a substantial amount of bandwidth to allow employees to access applications remotely at an acceptable speed. Installing MPLS systems or a managed network is one way of facilitating the hardware required to deliver the virtualised service.

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