The ongoing dynamic of staff working remotely justifies cloud-native Ops, says Olga Orekhvo, COO for CompatibL, via a Q&A.
Olga Orekhvo
(Cloud computing got a major boost during the pandemic when most staff members at financial services firms were compelled to work remotely, says Olga Orekhvo, chief operating officer (COO) at CompatibL Technologies. In fact, many financial services firms have embraced more than one cloud provider, which presents a new set of challenges. Orekhvo joined CompatibL in 2014 and now oversees day-to-day operations, contracts, legal and regulatory compliance, and policies and procedures for the Princeton, N.J.-based provider. FTF News recently got time with Orekhvo, which resulted in a two-part Q&A series. The first part is featured today and the second part will run next week.)
Q: Your nomination, which led to the win via the 2021 FTF Awards, focused on the challenge firms face in managing cloud-based systems supported by multiple-cloud providers. How widespread a problem is this situation for financial services firms?
A: Financial services firms rely on internal or vendor software solutions that are both highly specialized and customized for a specific firm. Replacing these highly specialized solutions or moving them from on-premises deployment to the cloud is slow and laborious process.
Understandably, the developers of these solutions are looking for the path of least resistance that often involves selecting just one cloud provider and a single set of technologies to support in their cloud migration.
Unfortunately, this approach results in the opposite of cost reduction when deployed across the entire organization. Frequently, the choices of cloud technologies are made independently by different internal software development divisions within the bank.
Even when the internal development teams apply a consistent approach, vendor systems introduce additional technologies and cloud providers to the mix. And when new technologies arise, switching from one technology to another is difficult to impossible when the ability to change is not built into the foundation of the software platform. This problem is widespread and presents a major obstacle to cloud adoption at financial services firms.
By engaging in extensive planning with our clients, CompatibL recognized this problem early and this led to the development of our unique approach to the cloud.
The CompatibL Platform can run on a variety of providers and cloud technologies and can also seamlessly integrate data and workflows that go across a disparate set of providers and technologies.
By building the ability to work across multiple providers and technologies into the very foundation of our platform — the Runtime API — we made it possible for our clients to use CompatibL with their own choice of cloud provider and technologies, as well as to use CompatibL to integrate their internal and vendor systems into seamless workflows even if they are running on different clouds, or different sets of technologies.
Q: The CompatibL nomination referred to a successful case study where a customer needed to transition to a nationally sanctioned cloud provider. Has CompatibL had similar situations since that one?
A: This is not a unique situation. In fact, such regulations are quite common.
Over the past year, we worked with three additional banking clients who are in the same position of being restricted by local regulations or internal guidelines to either their national provider, or a narrow list of approved local providers who committed to hosting the banks’ data and routing all traffic through the national networks only.
We expect more projects like this in the future as the banks are looking for ways to benefit from deploying their systems in the cloud without compromising data security and meeting the requirements of local banking secrecy laws.
Q: What are the lessons learned about cloud-native systems from the pandemic lockdown? And how are firms applying those lessons now?
A: The advent of remote work during the pandemic has significantly reduced management’s resistance in having applications in the cloud rather than in-house.
The most important change has not been technological, but psychological as during the pandemic period of remote work both the management and the employees have grown comfortable with not having their systems hosted in their physical proximity.
Remote work has been making steady inroads in the banking industry though more tolerant attitudes toward telecommuting on some days of the week, but its expansion has been slow.
COVID-19 had a tremendous impact by normalizing remote work and in a matter of months bringing about a transition that would otherwise take years or perhaps even decades.
Without a doubt, this rapid shift accelerated the digital transformation and the adoption of new technologies for working remotely.
The lasting impact long after the pandemic ends will be the ability of organizations to successfully manage a geographically distributed workforce with reduced need for in-person contact, providing new opportunities for expansion and recruiting. And this can only be achieved by leveraging the cloud.
Other than being an invaluable tool in the transition to remote work, the impact of the cloud on software development was critical to being able to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions during the pandemic.
Faced with the need to make rapid changes to their software systems, financial institutions have seen firsthand how the cloud provides a faster and more effective way to rapidly evolve their software and IT infrastructures compared to the traditional on-premises model.
The security of cloud infrastructures compared to hosting sensitive data locally is also changing.
With remote and new hybrid working models expected to be the norm for employees, on-premises-based access to data is now seen not as an advantage but as a liability.
Security risks are often cited as the reason some firms have not transitioned to the cloud.
Previously, financial services executives believed that just because a server is local and housed at a site owned by the company, it is more secure than the cloud. However, this is a false sense of security. A security breach will likely not be from someone breaking into a data center and physically accessing the local server but through a cyberattack.
If you look at some of the most significant security incidents, most of them happened when an on-premises or data center network was compromised through a cyberattack rather than through a breach of physical security.
In a modern world, you cannot operate while disconnected from the Internet. No matter how good your internal network security is, just the fact that it is a customized network already makes it less secure than the highly standardized networks of AWS, Azure, IBM, or any of the other major cloud providers.
Cloud infrastructure providers have whole teams and divisions staffed by extremely competent people who work on cybersecurity.
Over time, and especially during the pandemic-era remote work, banks learned to trust their cloud providers with protecting their data and systems and their trust has not been misplaced. Cloud providers can do things that an individual organization cannot do without a massive budget, and they can be your trusted partner in securing your network from cyberattacks.
Q: Are there new cloud computing environments that CompatibL Cloud will be embracing?
A: One of the most important benefits of CompatibL’s unique approach to the cloud is our ability to use the client’s preferred cloud infrastructure provider and their unique set of preferred cloud technologies.
Our ability to follow the clients’ choices — instead of forcing the client to follow ours — greatly simplifies procurement, reduces IT costs, and resolves many of the regulatory and operational issues.
Like all prior releases of cloud applications by CompatibL, our new models will continue to benefit from CompatibL’s unique API [application programming interface] to be multi-cloud, supporting not only all of the major cloud vendors but also regional and national providers, as well as private cloud solutions.
Because of our commitment to multi-cloud, CompatibL already supports a broad range of cloud providers and technologies.
On the other hand, most of our competitors commit to either a single provider and their proprietary technologies (usually, AWS or Azure), or only a few. Continuing CompatibL’s commitment to leadership in multi-cloud and broad cloud vendor support, we will continue to expand our coverage and will be adding new cloud providers and technologies in the coming year.
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