Top Dutch Bank Accelerates Container Strategy With Kubernetes and Rancher Labs

De Volksbank, a leading retail bank in the Netherlands, is accelerating the transformation of its IT infrastructure with the selection of Rancher Labs as its container platform partner. The move will see de Volksbank put Kubernetes containers - and Rancher orchestration - at the heart of its strategy to utilize cloud and microservices to ensure customer safety and usability.

The migration to the Rancher platform will dramatically accelerate the bank's move away from traditional, monolithic computing to a modern microservices architecture, and will support de Volksbank's goal to create a safe and resilient environment through rapid service innovation. De Volksbank is already running all software and development projects in production in Rancher. The team plans to migrate larger sections of core infrastructure in the next 12 months, with the long-term goal to run its portfolio of financial services in production, as microservices, on Rancher.

Gartner predicts by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production - a significant increase from fewer than 30% today. Currently, 86 percent of enterprise container users are using Kubernetes containers, with Rancher Labs in the vanguard of innovation in the space. Rancher was recently named a Leader in the Forrester New Wavetm Enterprise Container Platform Software Suites, Q4 2018.

Erik van der Meijde, Platform Delivery Manager at de Volksbank said: "Containers are now at the heart of our growth and innovation strategy. In order to be competitive, we need to increase the velocity of development through automation, whilst maintaining reliability and security. Rancher represents ?next level' containerization which allows us to become more agile and innovative."

Whilst de Volksbank has managed some software delivery and integration processes in containers over the last two years, developers have been required to manage a host of processes (security, network management, load-balancing etc.) themselves. Previously a drain on resources and a barrier to innovation, these fundamental processes, and many others, are automated in Rancher (Role-based access control (RBAC), Namespace-as-a-Service (NaaS), authentication, Application Catalog etc.), allowing development teams to focus on more strategic projects.

Crucially, Rancher provides a more agile environment for the development of innovative new financial services, such as building AI into predictive voice and text services which will resolve customer enquiries faster and more accurately. Rancher also galvanises de Volksbank's cloud migration strategy - the bank already has projects running in AWS, on Rancher, with aspirations scale cloud migration in the coming months.

"Most of all, Rancher allows us the freedom to experiment," said van der Meijde. "It is easy to set-up and regulate - we can trial new ideas in minutes, spinning up new instances, and tearing them down at a moment's notice. Importantly, automation means developers are free to be creative around new financial services, which will hugely benefit our customers in the long-term."

Organisations love Kubernetes because it helps significantly increase the agility and efficiency of their software development teams, enabling them to reduce the time and perils associated with putting new software into production. Rancher not only deploys Kubernetes clusters anywhere, on any provider, but it also unites them under centralised authentication and access control. Since Rancher is agnostic about where resources run, de Volksbank can easily bring up clusters in a different provider and migrate resources between them. Instead of having several independent Kubernetes deployments, Rancher unifies them as a single, managed Kubernetes Cloud.

Jeroen Overmaat, Regional Director at Rancher, believes the pressure to innovate in ever faster and leaner ways is driving the rapid adoption of containers. "Companies of all kinds, and in all sectors are under pressure to innovate more quickly and efficiently to remain competitive," he said. "Traditional development methods are time and resource-intensive, Rancher provides a container platform that automates many of the processes that, traditionally, delay development and slow ongoing management."

Headquartered in Utrecht, with 3.2 million customers and nearly 3,000 employees, de Volksbank is one of five government-appointed banks leading the Dutch financial infrastructure. Resilience and reliability were, therefore, essential factors in the bank's decision to work with Rancher. The bank is the latest in a slew of companies in the Netherlands (and across Europe) to put Kubernetes, and Rancher, at the heart of their business strategies.

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About de Volksbank

As a financial services provider engaged in banking, with a focus on the Dutch retail market, including small and medium-sized enterprises, de Volksbank carries multiple brands and has a single back office and IT organisation. The product range consists of three core product groups: payments, mortgages and savings. De Volksbank has a balance sheet total of ?63.9 billion and 3,015 internal employees (FTEs), which makes it a major player in the Dutch market. de Volksbank is headquartered in Utrecht.

Mission and Ambition

The mission of de Volksbank is banking with a human touch. To live up to our mission we formulated an ambition based on the principle of shared value. Shared value is directed towards social and economic as well as financial and non-financial aspects. Our ambition is to optimize this shared value by delivering benefits for customers, taking responsibility for society, giving genuine attention to employees and achieving returns for the shareholder.

About Rancher Labs

Rancher Labs delivers open source software that enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale, on any infrastructure across the data center, cloud, branch offices, and the network edge. With 27,000 active users and greater than 100 million downloads, their flagship product, Rancher, is the industry's most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform. For additional information, visit www.rancher.com and follow @Rancher_Labs on Twitter. All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.