The bank is collaborating with data centre provider Equinix on the project, which will will entail the relocation of its main site to significantly smaller premises, taking up roughly a quarter of the floor space of its existing shop.
DBS has been an enthusiastic proponent of cloud-based technology as a means to mitigate against growing volumes of digital transactions. Compute workloads at the bank have doubled in the last three years, forcing the bank to increase storage and computing capacity by 7x since 2014.
To keep the escalating costs at bay, DBS has committed to shift 50% of its compute workload to the public cloud by 2018. Last year, the bank launched cloud partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and has also deployed Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity technology, Office 365, in the workplace.
David Gledhill, DBS’ group chief information officer and head of technology and operations says the new data centre will also help the bank achieve its sustainability goals by improving energy efficiency by at least 10 times. The bank recently set a target to power 100% of its Singapore operations using renewable energy by 2030.
Says Gledhill: "With the new cloud data centre, we are able to significantly increase our energy efficiency as well as drastically reduce our carbon footprint.”
Singapore's DBS is expecting to slash 75% of the running costs of its main data centre by shifting it to a cloud-based environment.
