Creating a better digital experience for members: Nationwide Building Society chooses Microsoft Azure

Nationwide Building Society has always viewed its main public website, underpinned by on-premises infrastructure including ASP.NET web development environments and on-premises servers, as the virtual front door to its brand. But managing this legacy infrastructure and needing to keep up with manually copying files to servers kept IT teams from more productive work, which could help them better serve current and prospective members. This led the building society to explore automating and improving IT processes and building a multicloud web platform that would deliver better security, resilience, portability, and visibility. “We lacked visibility into every part of the infrastructure that runs the website, and that was a primary concern,” says Ian Sibley, Lead Engineer for nationwide.co.uk at Nationwide Building Society. “We perform at our best having visibility of our traffic and being able to react to malicious or blocked requests.”

To address these concerns, Nationwide Building Society moved its main website from on-premises servers to Microsoft Azure, deploying Azure ExpressRoute Direct for on-premises connectivity. Azure Front Door now fronts the website, and the back end is a mix of Azure Red Hat OpenShift, a Kubernetes platform service, and Azure App Service. The entire solution, the society’s first workload on Microsoft Azure, is deployed as infrastructure as code using HashiCorp Terraform. “With Azure, we now have a much better picture of how our website is behaving in the real world,” says Sibley.

Always-on speed, performance, and flexibility

Nationwide Building Society set out to develop a streamlined and statically generated ReactJS web application to deliver its website, allowing it to eliminate moving parts from its runtime and improve website speed, performance, and reliability. Using a full suite of Microsoft Azure products and services, the society was able to seamlessly migrate its existing website to the cloud and build in security and storage from the start with Azure Front Door, Azure Application Gateway, and Azure Blob Storage.

If an outage requires disaster recovery, Nationwide Building Society can use Azure Front Door for automatic failover protection to three global availability zones with zone-redundant storage. With high portability in Azure, the society can quickly generate a new, static copy of its website, deploy it to Azure Blob Storage, and then redirect traffic to other cloud servers to eliminate downtime. This adds a valuable layer of protection out of the box so Nationwide Building Society can be confident that its website will always deliver the information that members rely on when they need it. “We have Azure Front Door pointing to Application Gateway as the primary route to our website data in Azure Blob Storage,” Sibley explains. “Azure solutions have very few moving parts, and they still give us quite a lot of resilience and security.” 

Through its multicloud strategy, Nationwide Building Society is now more flexible, and it can better respond to spikes in member demand and accommodate new workflows. When it relied solely on on-premises infrastructure, the society had to predict the numbers of servers it would need to manage workloads for several years out, limiting its ability to commit to future projects. With Azure, the IT team doesn’t have to worry about increasing traffic or the next countdown to running out of resources. Instead, it only needs to manage capacity and optimize the benefits.

Maximizing website security and reliability with Azure

For maximum security, and in accordance with UK regulatory guidelines, Nationwide Building Society now protects its web environment with Azure Web Application Firewall. It also deployed the Azure DDoS Protection Standard Plan as part of Azure network security, which comes preconfigured to detect network attacks and block cyberthreats before they cause damage with no intervention required. To enhance its monitoring capabilities, it uses Azure Monitor to track trends and detect performance issues it might have otherwise missed. “I think a huge part of empowering our team is being able to make and monitor changes and proactively respond to issues,” says Sibley. “It’s a level of control and visibility that we’ve never had before.”

To keep pace with all of its infrastructural configuration changes, Nationwide Building Society manages all of its deployments with HashiCorp Terraform on Azure. “Using Terraform on Azure gives us a lot of reliability,” says Sibley. “We know exactly what’s being deployed, we have a lot of control and consistency, and if necessary, we can redeploy from scratch fairly easily in most scenarios.”

Given its successes to date, Nationwide Building Society continues to frequently evaluate and deploy new Azure products and services, including Azure DevOps, to further streamline the process for making development changes. “Being in Azure already clearly lends itself to using more Azure-based resources,” says Sibley. Adds Alan Bezzant, Senior Engineer at Nationwide Building Society, “When we find a problem, we typically find a solution within Azure and change our approach as we go along.”

Above all, the interoperability of different Azure products and resources makes security and compliance less of a burden, which was welcome news for Nationwide Building Society employees. “Our security team knows that Nationwide now has access to a variety of out-of-the-box capabilities that we can tune to our needs,” says Sibley.

End-to-end ownership and future innovation

With its main website more stable and secure than ever, Nationwide Building Society is enjoying end-to-end ownership of the web development process, including being able to write and deploy application code, which has created better visibility into how customers are using the website and which lines of business cost more money to run. As it monitors its environments, Nationwide Building Society can use Azure services to easily identify problem areas and improve infrastructure without a lot of effort, while also taking advantage of new monitoring and automation capabilities having to do with security and compliance. 

Deploying changes to application code previously took a minimum of three weeks with multiple hand-offs, and infrastructure changes could take several months. Now, Nationwide Building Society can regularly deploy changes across all aspects of its applications and infrastructure every two weeks and respond at much shorter notice if an urgent update is required. “The resilience of our surface area with Azure Front Door is massive,” says Bezzant. “It’s hard to envision a scenario where the site wouldn’t be available, which is quite comforting.”

To extend its transformation benefits, Nationwide Building Society took the opportunity to refresh its website from the ground up, rewriting copy, designing cleaner and simpler visuals, and creating a snappier and smoother feel and flow. The website updates perfectly complement the performance benefits of its new, statically generated website running as a single page application using JavaScript APIs with Azure.

Considering where it’s been on its cloud journey and the near-limitless future that lies ahead, Nationwide Building Society says it plans on expanding on the investments it’s already made in Azure infrastructure and exploring new opportunities. “Our website was our first production workload on Microsoft Azure and it’s quite a big one with lots of customer traffic, so we’ve been a good test case within the company,” says Sibley. “Our colleagues will be able to follow some of the patterns that we’ve laid down and discover and implement their own workloads.”

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