NAB has achieved an Australian big four first, it says, successfully migrating its business banking platform, NAB Connect, to AWS cloud.

Connect’s new cloud home is expected to deliver greater “resilience and reliability” for NAB’s business banking platform, which currently serves around 70,000 customers.

In a statement, NAB’s enterprise technology chief, Steve Day, said the bank’s business customers have already reaped service benefits since the migration, with Connect encountering “fewer interruptions” and delivering “a more seamless customer experience”.

He added that the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) capability, a virtual computing system built specifically for app-heavy environments, has provided “a secure and scalable compute capacity, reducing operational risk and cost, while supporting platform resilience”.

“Our customers are busy running their businesses and want their online banking experience to be reliable, simple and secure. This migration allows us to develop new services to help our business customers drive operational efficiencies without disrupting their day-to-day activities,” Day said.

Leveraging a new Auto Scaling function, NAB said it can automatically adjust the platform’s capacity “to maintain steady and predictable performance”.

“For example, we supported a 42 per cent increase in usage due to EOFY transactions,” he said.

Day praised AWS’s flexible infrastructure, which “can be modified securely in minutes, as opposed to days and weeks”.

Since the shift to cloud, infrastructure maintenance times on the platform have reduced by 60 per cent, he said.

Connect supports around 70,000 business customers across Australia, with $141 billion in payments processed in August alone, according to NAB.

The platform features a number of business-specific functions, including multiple user account and authorisation level management, uncapped payment transfers, transaction data portability, and the ability to create unique business PayIDs.

NAB has also spruiked AWS’s security offering, with the Amazon’s GuardDuty function – a real-time threat detection service – promising to deliver “enhanced fraud detection” across NAB accounts and workloads.

Earlier this month, Steve Day revealed the bank had successfully migrated 40 per cent of its apps to the cloud, including support for the recent rollout of 1,200 APIs.