Case Study

Big 4 Bank: Tagging & Labelling

Maintaining insight and control on the cloud journey, with DigiRen expertise helping the bank uplift their compliance.

At a Glance

DigiRen helped a Big 4 bank boost cloud tagging compliance from 14% to 95% by simplifying the tagging schema, establishing ownership, and creating a governance forum. This improved cost allocation accuracy, reduced compliance burden, and enabled ongoing monitoring with detailed AWS and GCP reporting for better cloud management.

81%
Improvement against baseline compliance rate
50%
Reduction in mandatory tags/labels
4
Ongoing governance forum meetings at engagement completion

Challenge

Our client is one of the “big 4” banks in Australia, providing banking and financial products and services to over 8.5 million retail and business customers across more than 30 markets in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Pacific, Europe, America and the Middle East. As part of the bank’s ‘Simplification’ program launched in 2018/2019, the bank commenced a mass migration of applications to public cloud - AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. That journey has involved migrating existing applications to the cloud and building new applications in the cloud.

Tagging/labelling is critical to maintaining insight and control in an efficient and automated public cloud environment. It is foundational to achieving compliance in downstream processes that rely on identity and ownership data such as cost allocation, shutdowns, patching, incident & problem management and policy application. With the ‘Simplification’ program effort focused on timely application migration execution, discipline around tagging/labelling was no longer at the level required, and as a result, dependent downstream processes were either not compliant or required a high degree of manual intervention to maintain compliance.

The Challenge for DigiRen

To restore compliance and confidence in the bank's cloud environment by designing a sustainable tagging and labelling framework which embeds compliance, automation and operational efficiency.

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Approach

DigiRen’s approach to uplifting tagging/labelling began with an assessment against best practice to identify and prioritise areas for improvement.

To ensure sustainability and efficiency, DigiRen also established links to external programs and identified other component dependencies.

The action plan coming out of the assessment included:

  1. Establishing ownership
  2. Simplification of the schema
  3. Creating an ongoing governance and reporting mechanism
  4. Kicking off an uplift drive

Outcomes

Working with the banks internal team, DigiRen helped deliver the following outcomes:

  • 95% average compliance against mandatory tags/labels for AWS accounts (an 81% improvement vs the baseline average compliance rate of 14%) enabling greater accuracy of cloud chargeback and cost allocation.
  • Cloud schema uplift and simplification, providing clearer rules and guidance and a reduced set of mandatory tags, lowering the burden of compliance and maintenance on both platform and workload teams.
  • Established a governance forum as a decision-making group with standing representation from key stakeholders to establish priorities and monitor progress.
  • Established AWS and GCP reporting at account/project and resource level to support decision-making.
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