As one of the largest cloud adopters in Africa, Absa is promoting cloud fluency as part of its broader efforts to promote learning, experimentation and innovation across the organization to enhance the banking experience for its customers. Therefore, Absa has launched an internal cloud incubator program to participate in AWS’s Skills Guild initiative, a comprehensive cloud skills training program.
More than 1500 staff will be equipped
By migrating to the cloud, companies can eliminate the expense of building and managing on-site data centers while gaining the ability to reduce infrastructure costs and scale up and down rather than paying for excess on-premises capacity. This program is designed to help large enterprise organizations accelerate their cloud adoption journey and build cloud fluency for their employees.
Andrew Baker, Absa Group Chief Technology Officer, said,
“Cloud is rapidly becoming the norm for large companies, a trend that was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted a step-change in digital solutions. Using cloud allows us to store much more data cost-efficiently, compared with physical data centers. Cloud has already improved our ability to manage and access data and will enable us to bring products to market faster.”
The cloud incubator initiative will equip more than 1500 staff across Absa’s African operations with advanced cloud computing skills this year. “The AWS Skills Guild offers enterprises a comprehensive approach to organization-wide cloud enablement, and is designed to not only impart cloud skills, but create excitement, momentum, and accelerate paths to innovation. AWS Skills Guild is based on our experience building enterprise-wide skills transformation plans for our customers across the globe, including National Australia Bank, Deloitte, Kmart Group, and many more,” explains Chris Erasmus, Commercial Sector Leader for AWS in South Africa.