Banco Santander

Security and compliance are the biggest challenges of financial industry. Usually cloud data centres are often managed by external contractors who share their cloud infrastructure virtually with other users. While providers isolate each client’s cloud, with a set of native or third-party resources to manage security configurations, the challenge is to establish a shared responsibility model with them, considering that security management and on-premises systems require different approaches. A security perimeter, identity and access management, and in-transit and at-rest encryption are key issues, depending on the service: infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, serverless and so on.

Most financial entities have on-premises data centres, based on virtual machines. Now, Santander is adopting a hybrid ecosystem based on on-premise and public cloud providers. Our mindset must, therefore, change: cloud adoption is not only a new technology but a new paradigm for which our bank must undertake an overarching digital transformation, affecting each division’s operation model, financial strategy, software development, infrastructure deployment, employee training, and recruitment.

"The best way for an efficient cloud journey is to put together a high-performance team — usually known as Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) —of experienced professionals that work with the cloud service provider to devise and implement strategy that meets the requirements of the company"

Evolving status of classical IT systems poses a steep learning curve in the early stages and gets people out of the comfort zone, but when technical teams climb this learning curve, benefits acquired pay off. Architecture blueprints, learning path, and employee training are part of the entire digital transformation. The best way for an efficient cloud journey is to put together a high-performance team — usually known as Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) —of experienced professionals that work with the cloud service provider to devise and implement strategy that meets the requirements of the company. This strategy should involve security, risk, IT, finance, human resources, and any area affected by the new cloud paradigm. A Cloud Centre of Excellence leverages the company’s tools, technical stack, and policies to guide each team in navigating new challenges to build a robust ecosystem integrated with corporate tools such as identity provider, automation, monitoring, back-up, and others to create a homogeneous operation model for both on-premises and public-cloud workloads. Teams can get the knowledge, resources, and autonomy needed to use public cloud resources for building digital products that enhance customer and user experience with the highest security and reducing time to market.

Usually, innovation capacity has been linked with infrastructure capacity. Because expanding or modernizing on-premises data centres can be expensive and slow, small entities or teams with a small budget innovate more slowly than they would like. Public Cloud services allow everybody to access and test cutting-edge technology instantly and at a cheaper price. Thus, companies can release new digital products and allow customers to use highly innovative services.