Afrigather KCB Group, Kenya’s largest financial institution with a market capitalisation of $963.3 million (KES 124 billion), has accomplished the migration of its IT infrastructure to iColo, a tier III information centre.
The migration from on-premise infrastructure to iColo’s amenities in Karen and Gigiri, Nairobi, started in 2022. Two folks aware of the matter instructed TechCabal that the migration was motivated by a necessity to regulate prices. The financial institution had been incurring hundreds of thousands of shillings on energy, cooling, and uptime for its in-house information centre.
It’s unclear what value financial savings KCB will obtain by this colocation migration since no particular projections or estimates have been offered.
KCB declined to touch upon this story.
Earlier than the transfer to colocation, KCB ran all its companies on-premises. Nevertheless, some companies, equivalent to Trade, which presents foreign money trade, on-line buying and selling, and worldwide cash transfers, are hosted on Microsoft Azure, and plans are in place to maneuver different companies to AWS.
“This transition concerned shifting to a professionally managed colocation facility,” one particular person aware of the migration course of and who requested to not be named so he may converse freely instructed TechCabal
Colocated information centres, like iColo, present shared areas inside bigger amenities the place a number of corporations lease area. This enables such corporations to learn from shared companies and infrastructure.
“Colocation presents a more cost effective answer in comparison with constructing and sustaining an unbiased information centre. Banks can obtain economies of scale by sharing widespread sources,” a banking government, who additionally wished to not be named, instructed TechCabal.
KCB isn’t the one Kenyan financial institution to decide on this mannequin. In keeping with an business insider, Fairness Financial institution and NCBA have been utilizing colocated amenities over the previous couple of years to handle prices, signalling a rising development amongst native banks to favour off-site information centre options.
Kenyan banks have additionally started upgrading their core banking functions. In October, Stanbic upgraded its core platform, Temenos, to model R24. KCB makes use of Temenos for conventional banking and not too long ago up to date it to model R21 for its Rwandan operations. Nevertheless, KCB makes use of Sopra, a special core system for digital banking companies.
