Financial institutions, mainly banks are in that phase of their journey where they are architecting their public clouds and simultaneously moving applications there. Most new applications are directly going in the public cloud skipping the on-prem phase and hence there is an exponentially growth in their cloud usage. On apps side, its no longer the less important workloads in the public cloud but more and more business critical applications are now hosted there as well.
Financial institutions are highly regulated and are held to higher standards. Hence they have strict requirements for anything they build to be able to deliver high quality products and services. As the market and technology landscape is evolving, its very hard to build something today while making it future-proof for what may come down the road. At AWS Re:Invent, AWS Network Architects have famously said that you should not design your cloud for more then 12 to 18 months, in other words, be prepared to re-architect in that time frame. Most of the financial institutions I am referring to take more then this time to adopt a new technology. So what do they do then?
With such evolving requirements and fast evolving tech stack, these financial institutions evaluate their technology choices with utmost care and define higher level goals which are focused on business objectives that can iteratively be translated to evolving technical needs. This same principal applies to Public Cloud Networks where they run their business critical applications.
Why Cloud Networking is Critical?
When any organization goes to Public Cloud, the basic thing it needs to do is to setup Accounts/Subscriptions/Projects/Billing etc. After this is setup, the first infra piece that needs to be setup is the NETWORK. Unless you are using pure SaaS services, without creating cloud networks you cannot host any IaaS and most PaaS services. Hence Cloud Network
becomes a foundational element. As complexity in networking is a n-square problem, it doesn't increase linearly, it increases exponentially as the footprint increases. The security, segmentation and connectivity requirements for a 5 VPC network running non-critical workload is not the same as when you have 20 VPCs across Prod, Dev, Test and on-prem connectivity.
Therefore if the foundational service is not setup correctly with scale, ease of use, security, and day2 operational readiness in mind, it becomes a blocker for cloud adoption and adversely impact developer productivity.
I will discuss more on this topic in a separate blog but to summarize, native public networking needs customer to do massive heavy lifting in putting all the puzzle pieces together to get it to work. As an example, in AWS, to get a basic level of visualization for your VPC Flow Logs, you need to use and pay for 9 services as explained in this AWS blog.
What Cloud Networks Need to Deliver
I would highlight few points that are common across most financial institutions in my conversations, to help them achieve their business and technical objectives.
Provide Leading Edge Technology
Help Gain Competitive Advantage
Improve Developer Experience
Meet Strict Scale, Performance and Security Requirements
Support and Promote Agility, Optimizing Resources, Reducing Effort
Provide Leading Edge Technology
Financial institutions want their cloud network to provide it with leading edge technology which solves today’s problems but is also built with future architectures and requirements in mind. It should be based on flexible, modular, and scalable best practices design that is capable of running banking and other financial systems in highly regulated environments. The platform should brings agility to connectivity and security that consistently matches and exceeds developer expectations and cybersecurity requirements.
"We built our cloud using a technology that could only do 1.25 Gbps of encrypted throughput. This severely limited what we could offer to business and replacing this has costed us dearly and most important of that have been the time wasted."
Help Gain Competitive Advantage
Financial institutions are continuously looking to gain competitive advantage against their peer organizations by providing agile and secure environments to its developers at a faster pace. They demand the cloud network to help them achieve better time to market so they can provide new functionalities faster. A customer said to me
"I need my Cloud Network to deliver an environment where I can deploy my applications where they run faster, better, cheaper and closer to the end consumer."
Improve Developer Experience
One of the reasons developers were the first cohort to public cloud is because the traditional IT was too slow in providing them services that they needed. Compute and storage virtualization had sped things up but network and security was still where most delays happened. Now that IT is taking charge of public cloud, they need to treat developer experience as top priority. Most financial institutions treat themselves as technology companies and they have digitized their entire business hence developers are key to be able to provide the continuous improvement and optimization needed.
Development teams are demanding IT to provide them with self-service capabilities for the entire stack including networking and security so they can build the infrastructure they need at the speed they require with networking and security baked in. Bottom line is that developers should be able to consume cloud networks in the same way they consume applications. Automated, via code!
"We need to provide a much improved developer experience in public cloud compared to what we offer in our on-premises environments. Developers are our clients and the backbone of our innovation. We want to provide simple, global common standard which simplify service consumption while abstracting all complexity that the network platform should take care of".
Meet Strict Scale, Performance and Cybersecurity Requirements
The financial industry is often handicapped in adopting newer technologies at a faster pace because their security, compliance, audit, and scale requirements are hard to meet with new products. Hence they require Cloud Networks to provide next gen, intelligent, secure, and scalable environments to host their revenue generating, business critical, client facing applications. As the cloud adoption increases, the requirement for scale and performance also increases, and often this is not linear but exponential. With more applications, the inter application dependency mapping and keeping control of who is talking to who becomes increasingly complicated.
As infrastructure builders for new environments, we dont even know what performance and scale different applications would need. We don't have baselines to compare against as the traffic patterns and app footprints are completely new in the cloud. Hence we need Cloud Networks to be flexible so that can be easily and modularly scaled to meet new and unknown patterns while not breaking any of our security requirements.
Support and Promote Agility, Optimizing Resources, Reducing Effort
Developers are leading the charge in modern way of working, which is based on agile thinking, agile technology with short work sprints with clear outcome. They require Cloud Network platforms to align with this approach by promoting and following agile methodology in how infrastructure is built, secured and operated. It must focus on optimizing time and resource utilization, reducing manual effort and integrating nicely with the existing ecosystem.
"We need the simplicity and automation of cloud, but also bring in the visibility and controls we require as an enterprise."
About Aviatrix
Aviatrix offers a platform for Advanced Networking, Security, Automation and Day2 Operational services in public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI and Ali Cloud). It is deployed by hundreds of enterprises and Fortune 500 companies, delivers business-critical cloud networking to support business-critical applications across all business verticals, including banking, finance, and other regulated industries. Aviatrix simplifies and accelerates cloud migrations, saving millions in project delays and downtime and reducing business risk. Intelligent Cloud Networking software improves performance, security, and operational visibility in and across AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle and Alibaba clouds and extends that operating model to enterprise-edge locations. Combined with the Aviatrix Certified Engineer (ACE) program, the industry’s first and only multicloud networking certification, Aviatrix is enabling enterprises to build infrastructure for the next phase of cloud transformation. Learn more at www.aviatrix.com.