Established in 1978, Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB) has grown to become one of Malaysia's largest fund management companies. PNB has been a major driving force in corporate Malaysia's journey through its acquisitions, divestments and value creation activity. Building on this solid foundation, PNB has continuously diversified its portfolio with investments into different geographies and asset classes including global equities, private investments and real estate. As the custodian of wealth for more than 14 million unit holders, PNB strives towards delivering sustainable returns and ultimately enhancing wealth of all Malaysians.

Data Center is the backbone of PNB’s financial services system. However, with the dividend announcement of its flagship fund at the closure of every financial year, its system used to experience a massive load on 1st January due to an eventual spike in traffic resulting from a 10-fold increase in account activities. As PNB embarked on a digital transformation journey in 2018, it laid out a 5-year plan which requires the transformation of its data center to facilitate more efficient operations to sustain growth and provide better overall user experiences. In addition, another challenge was to ensure that its data must reside on-premises and within the country. Consequently, PNB was looking to collaborate with a reliable, highly secured Tier 1 cloud provider with expertise in managing hybrid cloud architecture and has a strong presence in Malaysia.

To accelerate its digital transformation journey, PNB chose Alibaba Cloud as its technology partner. The reliability, availability and extensibility of the cloud infrastructure provided by Alibaba Cloud is unparalleled and has not only helped PNB to gain scalability but also boost speed to market. With Alibaba Cloud hybrid technology innovations, PNB successfully maintained an exceptional financial services delivery record and customer satisfaction score despite the spike in traffic during peak periods such as dividend announcements.

Furthermore, with a strong local presence, Alibaba Cloud ensures a secure connection to PNB’s on-premises systems with lower latency. Another Critical advantage of partnering with Alibaba Cloud is swift and relentless assistance from the Alibaba Cloud team. With continuous local support from Alibaba Cloud, PNB has managed to resolve some of its biggest challenges over the years.

Being the top global provider for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in the Asia Pacific, Alibaba Cloud is trusted for its high scalability and hybrid capability features. PNB leveraged Alibaba Cloud’s IaaS capabilities to build its hybrid architecture with scalable computing power, advanced real-time data processing, and analytic capabilities.

Alibaba Cloud has helped PNB maintain network and system efficiencies to ensure its customers can seamlessly access their accounts without any downtime or delay. Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) provides high elasticity to PNB to instantly scale and meet its varying business demands. Alibaba Cloud experts also helped PNB design a customized hybrid infrastructure based on its specific business requirements of connecting on-premises systems with Alibaba Cloud to improve the network topology and ensure high bandwidth and low latency.

PNB also availed Alibaba Cloud’s premium support services to enable its ICT team to better understand Cloud infrastructure and expedite digitalization of its financial services. This has enabled PNB to further enhance its customer service portal and improve its mobile application with more functionalities to strengthen self-service towards ensuring a smooth customer experience.

PNB is swiftly transforming its financial services infrastructure with the help of Alibaba Cloud to address current operational challenges and plan for the years ahead. With a clear digital transformation roadmap and technology partners such as Alibaba Cloud, PNB is determined to stride forward by ensuring operational resilience, high availability, secure digital engagement and a seamless user experience.