IBM has announced it has signed a 10-year contract with Lloyds Banking Group (Lloyds), one of the UK’s leading high street banks. With headquarters in London, United Kingdom, Lloyds is a retail and commercial bank recognized as one of the country’s ‘Big Four’ clearing banks. Established in 1765 it has branches in England and Wales. The cost of the deal is in the region of £1.3 billion ($1.66).
In a cost cutting exercise that will see the bank save around £750 million ($955 million), Lloyds will outsource a range of services to IBM. The project, named ‘Aurora’, will see IBM offer Lloyds dedicated cloud services hosted at its UK data centers and on Lloyds’ premises. The company will also manage the bank’s migration of applications to the cloud.
The deal will see 1,500 Lloyds staff and contractors (500 permanent staff and 1000 contractors) move to IBM from its data centers in West Yorkshire and Edinburgh, United Kingdom. IBM will manage around 2,000 of the bank's applications on a “Windows, Unix, Linux and IBM I-Series” platform. Lloyds hopes the move will safeguard it against the ‘Denial of Service’ (DOS) attack it experienced in January of this year.
"As we have said to our colleagues, we are considering options to extend use of cloud technology in pursuit of the Group's aim to be the best bank for customers,” explained a statement from the bank. “We do not comment on speculation, and if any decisions are made they will be communicated to our colleagues first,” the statement added.
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