From his perch in Amsterdam as chief technology officer at ING, Tony Kerrison is aiming to provide a path that banks in all parts of the world can follow. ING’s project involves building a large hybrid cloud that combines features of public clouds and private data centers, one it will open to other banks to use. The hybrid or shared IT infrastructure, Kerrison believes, will achieve the variable costs, scalability, flexibility, and on-demand availability offered by public cloud computing in a way that addresses the security, compliance and performance requirements banks adhere to in their internal clouds.
“One issue a lot of financial companies have today is we all carry a lot of legacy in our environments, which means we can’t move quickly and respond to demands the way we’d like to,” Kerrison says. “Technologies like cloud will help us to be more agile and adapt to the demands of our clients in a much better way. Cloud computing has given us the opportunity to have some standards we work to and think about different ways of providing our services than just the traditional way of running everything ourselves.”
By taking a hybrid approach, ING can start with full control over the physical environment in which servers, storage and apps live. Over time, as regulations become clearer and as public clouds and their service level agreements become better understood, more computing can shift to less expensive and more easily scalable cloud venues.
As banking IT infrastructure evolves, more systems will migrate from mainframe and client-server to web-centric and cloud computing. This evolution will open up new efficiencies, both in cost and systems performance, to financial institutions. Systems like ING’s will help to identify key issues and opportunities as this migration progresses.
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