Standard Chartered, one of the oldest names in the financial industry, intends to shift all applications and services into the cloud. Cloud computing giant Kubernetes will be instrumental in this process.
The decision by the bank is a response to the changing banking dynamics, which is increasingly going mobile.
The bank’s Chief Technology Officer, Bhupendra Warathe, will oversee the transfer. Specifically, he will handle the transfer of data beginning from 1853, and from the regions of APAC and EMEA.
Warathe’s biggest task is to administer new skills to the bank’s nearly 10,000 employees in order to prepare them to use the Kubernetes platform. Kubernetes will facilitate all of Standard Chartered’s new payment and trade finance systems.
Working on a geographical perspective, Warathe stated that the bank is opting for a multi-cloud, multi-region strategy. This plan would provide a better insight to the employees about the workloads of different regions and would offer better resilience and reliability.
Standard Chartered has shortlisted two companies for the provision of cloud computing. Microsoft Azure was chosen for its quality of service in AI, security and SaaS competencies. The bank has not released the identity of the second cloud tech provider yet.
Reportedly, Standard Chartered has already been using public cloud for the last three years and has moved six applications to its second anonymous cloud provider as pilot tests.
“We already have experience and hence we’re very comfortable going big with a couple of cloud providers,” Warathe says. “We have a financial market business, which has many deployments where we need to do grid computing for risk analysis and portfolio level computations. And at the peak, we have to use 10,000 vCPUs – so it’s that kind of load, that kind of computer.”
In all of this dramatic shift, the bank is also trying to minimize costs of developing new infrastructure. “With cloud, we don’t have to buy hardware and network and switches and everything else to really put into our books and capitalise it for the next four to five years; that‘s one of the biggest advantages on the financial management side as well”, says Warathe.
