Using AWS instead of an on-premises datacenter infrastructure allowed ME Bank to accelerate the provisioning of development and testing environments by up to six weeks. “We can create a new environment within one day,” says Fanning. “We also reduced the cost of delivering development and test environments for new applications and services by 75 percent.”

The speed of provisioning resources on AWS allowed ME Bank to achieve project milestones and keep the technology refresh program within its $60 million budget. “If we had continued to use a physical infrastructure, we would have encountered substantial delays in the transformation program,” Fanning says. “Within three months of starting to use AWS in November 2012, we delivered the first elements of the transformation program for release into production. Without AWS, all those deadlines would have slipped—at the cost of millions of dollars.”

ME Bank also uses AWS to distribute interest rates and other variable information to advertisements running on prominent Australian media websites. The bank uses Amazon CloudFront to pull the XML data from an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket and present it to advertising campaigns that may attract one million impressions or more. By delivering data for its advertising campaigns from Amazon CloudFront rather than web servers in its on-premises datacenter, ME Bank has been able to maintain fast response times for its customers while delivering large advertising campaigns. “The scalability of the AWS content delivery solution has enabled us to support a 2000 percent increase in web requests when running our campaigns,” says Fanning.

Because AWS services are available on demand, ME Bank can use its infrastructure more cost-effectively. The bank typically undertakes testing between 8:00 am and 11:00 pm. Once ME Bank became comfortable with the AWS Cloud, it implemented automatic shutdown of instances after 11:00pm and over weekends. “Automating the shutdown of Amazon EC2 instances when we’re not using them has proven highly cost-effective,” says Fanning. “We’ve reduced our AWS spend by 49 percent per instance.”

ME Bank currently does not use actual customer information in its development and testing environment running on the AWS Cloud. With the technology refresh project nearing its scheduled completion in 2014, ME Bank is considering how to extend its use of AWS to its production environments on a large scale. “Ultimately, we may institute a policy of moving all our applications and workloads to the AWS Cloud unless there is a good reason not to.” says Fanning. “Our focus is on being a great digital bank—we don’t want to be a great infrastructure shop.”