Most of the largest banks have announced a shift to the cloud using microservices and APIs. U.S. Bank has selected Microsoft Azure as the target for new projects, as well as for the lift and shift of existing platforms. Key to lowering future maintenance costs and flexibility will be the refactoring of the existing solutions it moves and what it decides to keep on the mainframe.
As the world becomes more productive and cost-effective, banks need to adopt digital operations, even as the internet is transitioning from Web2 into Web3. Banks that are slow to adopt cloud computing and open APIs will have failed to gain the productivity and cost efficiencies these technologies make available. Core solution providers need to be willing to partner with a wide range of service providers, including those with whom they may compete. Cloud-native solutions providers know they become stronger as more third-party service providers add value to their core offerings, and so welcome all valid third parties that are willing to invest to make that integration happen:
“With this move, the Minneapolis bank is joining many of its peers. Accenture published research last week that found that 82% of bank executives intend to move 50% or more of their mainframe software to the cloud.
“That is a significant shift from the data that we had collected prior,” said Nichole Lanza, managing director – technology strategy and advisory for banking cloud at Accenture. “What surprised us even more was that more than 75% of the workloads were expected to go [to the cloud] over the next five years.”
Over the past year, many of the security, risk and compliance challenges have been solved for banks around cloud computing, she said.
“And the technology has matured,” Lanza said. “We have the technology to automate the migration of the workloads.”
Why Azure
The bank chose Microsoft Azure after going through a rigorous evaluation process with all three major cloud providers — Amazon, Google and Microsoft — over the course of several months, according to Venkatachari.
“We considered a variety of technology issues, what’s best from a risk and compliance perspective and security aspects as well,” he said. “And we concluded that Microsoft Azure would meet our needs the best, in terms of their approach to partnering and working together. And frankly, it also helps us further a deeper business partnership that we have with Microsoft.” Bank staffers already use the software giant’s Office 365 and Teams, for instance.
Security and resilience were big topics in the talks between U.S. Bank and Microsoft, said Bill Borden, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Financial Services.”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group
