ING Direct management says it will spend a lot less time maintaining the bank's systems and a lot more time developing new products and services, following the transfer of its entire banking system to a private cloud.The bank's chief operating officer, Simon Andrews, said that being cloud enabled would give the bank a great deal of agility."This is a highly automated and integrated environment," said Andrews."We can give more computing capacity to any single application if it has a big workload. That is a feature of cloud."We can deploy change in real time, while we continue to serve customers and staff."ING Direct claims to be the first Australian bank to have moved its entire banking system into the cloud. It worked on the project with a number of technology companies, including Dimension Data, Cisco, NetApp and Microsoft.The ZT platform, as the new system is called, has been built using FlexPod and Microsoft FastTrack reference architectures.Since 2012 the bank has had a "bank in a box" application, which allowed it to create a "virtual bank" for design, development and testing. The ZT platform is, in effect, taking bank in a box into full-scale production.Andrews said: "We can do patching without scheduled outages. We can do these things during the course of the day."It is a much more robust system. We expect to have zero data loss."ING Direct's current strategy is to become the primary bank for more of its customers. For most of its history in Australia the bank has relied on its high-interest online savings account and mortgage products to attract business. But a few years ago it started expanding its product range, launching a transaction account and superannuation fund.Andrews said the move into the cloud would support the bank's strategy by freeing up staff from dealing with operational issues and allowing them to work on enhancements to products and services."We are confident we can deliver a lot more features for customers," he said."We will go through the bank's applications landscape and renew all the apps. We have done the infrastructure and now we will focus on the web, mobile, CRM [customer relationship management], telephony and our data warehouse."They will all get an upgrade. We will add functions and redesign the experience."