云计算现在是不是有点过时了, 随着银行从其业务线的广泛采用中受益? 考虑到这两家公司的季度盈利都大幅增长 AWS 和 微软Azure 2018年第四季度(分别为45%和76%), shouldn’t we expect that banks across the UK 和 globally have contributed substantially to this rapid growth? There certainly are success stories: Capital One is an often touted “all-in” cloud migration AWS case study; Starling 和 other challengers in the UK have built on a cloud-first architecture; 和 both RBS 和 CYBG have built out new br和s sitting on a greenfield cloud enabled tech stack.
然而, 统计数据, 这些成功, 不一定要指向压倒性的采用, 整个行业对云计算的接受和拥抱. What we’ve seen first-h和 is not just a reticence to jump feet first into cloud adoption, but also a fundamental inability to do so due to three main reasons: data privacy concerns, rigid organisational structures 和 an underlying complexity in technical architecture.
数据隐私一直是银行关注的问题, 这是正确的, but the stringent penalties for data breaches introduced under GDPR in May 2018, coupled with the enhanced accountability requirements prescribed by the Senior Manager Regime have really put this back into the forefront of executives’ minds. 在涉及云的地方，这变得更加相关.
This makes sense: for the last five years banks have voiced their concerns about cloud security 和 the cloud providers, who happen to be the largest companies in the world with next to unlimited resource, 回应. Now the agenda will switch – the cloud providers will need to demonstrate their ability to effectively manage 和 control data (which no doubt they will be able to do), 而且重要的是, banks will need to make sure that they can implement 和 evidence this same degree of control, 这是, 一如既往地, 不那么简单.
What’s clear is that banks need to prevent concerns about data privacy writing off the topic of cloud. The concerns are valid 和 the importance of adequate data controls inside 和 outside the organisation should not be understated, 但是要有一个有利的治理过程, 清晰的文档和对流程的遵守, 这些担忧是可以缓解的.
Without breaching into the debate on the extent to which banks are able to effectively implement agile delivery practices, there are certainly comparisons to be drawn with the extent to which widescale cloud adoption has 和 will be successful, 不仅仅是因为, 在很大程度上, cloud implementation projects 和 the ongoing development on a cloud-based infrastructure is heavily enabled by agile delivery.
The concept of DevOps encapsulates this quite perfectly – the introduction of expertise, team structures 和 practices that support both the development of applications 和 services, 以及他们正在进行的维护. This time last year I set up a team of DevOps engineers in a global bank to support a single product 和 it was nothing short of a battle, with roadblocks at every step of the process: finding the right people; putting in place contracts that supported a new style of working; implementing 和 setting up alerting 和 monitoring technology; aligning processes 和 procedures with existing support functions (often offshore); 和 securing business confidence in what we were doing. And this was in a bank that was readily embracing “digital” 和 the move to the cloud. 这对小型企业来说不是一个微不足道的挑战, single market product; imagine the effort involved to introduce the right organisational structure, practices 和 processes to support a cloud-based migration of a global core-banking system – or even multiple regional core-banking systems.
Banks shouldn’t simply expect that the introduction 和 adoption of cloud can fit neatly into the existing organisation; there are foundational behaviours 和 structures that need to be established to support this adoption first.
There’s a reason that the cloud success stories tend to focus on new entrants to the market or greenfield projects: untangling the architecture of global banks is incredibly difficult. 当涉及到这种大规模的平台迁移时, 云的话题几乎是无关紧要的. 刚从一家公司搬过来, legacy mainframe system to another would be challenging enough (和 indeed it is, 看看2018年TSB-Sabadell移民的情况就知道了). 在从头开始构建时，这些现有的包袱并不是等式的一部分, either as an entirely new organisation or as an entity that is technologically segregated from its parent.
银行应该把现在看作一个缓慢行动的机会, surely 和 strategically migrate to a cloud based infrastructure to improve the overall core banking experience. Lloyds Banking Group is testing a limited customer migration to Thought Machine, 基于云的核心银行系统, 汇丰银行(HSBC)采用多云方法至少已有两年时间. 这些例子集中在概念的证明上, followed by limited customer migrations which will ultimately result in the full move to cloud. Taking this proactive 和 measured approach will end up being far more successful than a knee-jerk, 都在, 承诺过多、兑现不足的移民.
Cloud computing is a topic that will be on the agenda for banks in the years to come. 组织的每一个层面都必须全心全意地接受它, heavily invested in 和 prioritised to truly unlock the many benefits that its implementation will enable.
