CIO advises CBA to adopt cloud computing as early as possible

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the CBA) has been on cloud computing deployments for several years, said Michael Harte, chief information officer and general manager of Group Enterprise Services. The goal of the CBA bank to introduce cloud computing is to introduce competition through cloud computing and get cheaper computing power. In his view, the CIO of banking should consider using cloud computing as soon as possible and consider taking an active part in the formation of standards.

In fact, the banking industry's informatization has been in a step-by-step or even a conservative process, for the security of the system and customer security concerns, the bank information seems to be always difficult and "cloud computing" relationship. It is understood that the CBA has been deploying cloud computing for several years, not only the bank's own application system running on the cloud platform, at the same time, CBA also provides cloud services to other institutions, in the deployment of the cloud, not only accumulated technical experience, but also in the business model for a new exploration.

Security Considerations

For security reasons, people are opposed to moving the business cloud. Harte that not all of the resources will migrate to the cloud, as other people fear. "There must be some non-core applications that are going to be put out and let those machines create value at a low cost," he said. The money saved can be used for other purposes and can be used to do other things. "Harte said. "You can't just move it all at once." Back in the fashionable era of outsourcing, people worry about security. When outsourcing is generally accepted, security is not a problem. Virtualization is coming, and security is a problem. In a cloud environment, users can use many automated tools to manage IT systems, reducing human intervention and reducing the risk of human involvement. ”

As early as 2007, the CBA bank saw that Google was already doing things like sending e-mails to the clouds and freeing up so many resources. So Harte thought: "If you can do more enterprise-scale activities on the public infrastructure platform, it's better to provide security through zoning." ”

Speed up the establishment of standards

"We've been doing cloud computing for years. But since cloud computing is invisible, it is more accurate to say that all we need is to buy software and infrastructure through the web as a service. At the same time, we just want to pay on demand. "So we seek to create open, component-based and service-oriented standards to achieve savings," Harte said. We want to get rid of the pattern of infrastructure computing and go into the refinement components and highly accurate data so that our customers can enjoy better services. ”

About cloud computing, the three things that CBA bank has done recently are: first, accelerate the establishment of standards. The CBA is made up of a flexible and fast-growing group to create standards. CBA released the first standard is about the ability of virtual machines-by X86 do mid-range server, operating on the Linux platform, to assume the internal computing capacity.

With the same technology, private clouds or public clouds are built, and applications from external public clouds can be imported into the internal private cloud.

The second thing CBA does is work with companies like Savvis and Amazon, where the CBA can run application development and testing in-house, or do it openly outside the enterprise.

The CBA can complete the switch in a few minutes. The CBA can extend these applications to the production environment. Once the CBA develops these capabilities and succeeds in proving that it can be fully produced, the CBA will be able to decide whether they should stay in the public cloud or fall back into the business.

This configuration takes only a few minutes, not days or weeks. The third thing the CBA has to do is: when it has the ability to provide customers with flexible "pay-and-use" service capabilities, it can allow customers to choose: is to safely, secretly in the enterprise internal private cloud running application? or after getting quite secure, let's run the application on the corporate external public cloud?

At present, the CBA bank has 40% of computing resources for testing and development.

Break the monopoly of equipment suppliers

CBA banks are trying to get suppliers to provide Web services on a cloud-based basis, but they are unwilling to do so because they do not need to. All of these existing suppliers, whether they are server vendors or storage vendors, are opposed to this model because they do not conform to their own accounting standards. They stick to their own, yet powerful, pattern. They want to keep locking you up and they're resisting competition. It's just the opposite of what the CBA wants to do. CBA in the last two years to achieve virtualization, with X86 mid-range machine to do virtualization. "If you have 4,000 servers, with a utilization rate of 5% to 10%, you can quickly halve this number and increase utilization to 80%, so you can save a lot of money and use it for better security and more autonomy." If you have a peak load, you can change it flexibly. In this way, your X86 server can be either HP, Dell, IBM, or any other service provider, and you can migrate as you like, introducing competition and getting cheaper computing power. "We're not going to get rid of suppliers," Harte said. We're telling them, "We don't want to spend as much money as we've always been, we spend less than half as much as we've spent in the past, and the money we save can be used for more dynamic and richer application services, or more granular data services. This allows us to add more value to our interactions with our customers. We try to pull money out of the back-end tools and use it to interact more closely with our customers. ”

Build better interaction with customers

"What the customer needs is any time at any place in real time convenient service and real-time value that they don't want to wait for." They don't want to wait for the program to run slowly. Therefore, our task is to modernize the core system, so that the system can be real-time access to provide real-time convenience and rich services. "Customers actually want to consume these services," Harte said. What they want is not the Internet 1.0, the time page is still. What they need now is dynamic content, a dynamic service like running water. They interact in real time through social networks. They need to see real-time interaction and transaction recognition. You have to have a finer level of service and higher dynamic content to meet their needs. They don't care how much money you spend in the background, even if you spend half the money in the past. They expect information to be secure and expect dynamic content. What they really need is a high level, more accurate, more readily available information. This allows them to handle banking in taxis, in the airport lounge, or in different work projects. They don't want long queues waiting to be called and don't want to wait until the next day to get confirmation of the deal. They need this confirmation now. We just need to liberate our traditional systems, jump out of the traditional infrastructure, and provide more dynamic front-end content and capabilities. ”

"We invented the system 30-40 years ago, which is based on an account, based on a transaction, based on a 10 o'clock in the morning opening, four o'clock in the afternoon or five, and everything is a bank that will be completed overnight or on weekends." And now our customers want 7x24 access, 7x24-hour convenience, 7x24-hour value, and they don't just trade, they need analytics, they need counseling, they need all kinds of help, and we're the ones who can help them the most. In order to be able to provide such a variety of services, to provide services related to their lives, we have the responsibility to provide a completely different computing style. We have invested heavily in the core of the banking modernization project, as the best online bank, we stick to the investment, we have decided to either do the first to modernize the bank, or do the fastest to follow the advanced Bank, and all this is around us to provide customers with the services they need to the central goal. ”

Finally Harte also suggests that the CIO of banking should consider using cloud computing as soon as possible, consider taking an active part in the formation of standards, and consider experimenting. Some experiments are safe, they can try to do it, and there are small-scale experiments that do not pose any risk to their infrastructure and they can try to do it. "If they think more about using cloud technology, they can save a lot of money in a business and get breakthroughs in many products," he said. Then they are not imitating others, they are leading others. The