The Financial Services ( FS ) industry is well-known for its riskaverse attitude . Reticent to adopt new technologies due to a continued concern over security breaches and complex regulatory restrictions , the industry has fallen behind the innovative leaps evolving in our digital world . However , we are finally seeing this begin to change as organizations fight to maintain a competitive advantage .
A Changing Paradigm
Last year , Capital One , AWS ’ poster child for cloud adoption in the FS industry , presented its successful cloud journey at AWS re : - Invent 2015 , paving the way for its financial peers .
Broader adoption of public cloud across enterprises , as well as the significant shift towards consumerization of IT , is leading FS companies to rethink how they have traditionally approached IT operations . A significant portion of their IT budget , once allotted to maintaining their data centers , is now being refocused on innovation , reallocated to improving business agility , and delivering value to their customer .
An Industry Pioneer
Natixis Global Asset Management , one of the world ’ s largest assets managers , is now amongst a growing number of FS pioneers , transforming their traditional IT operations to increase business agility , streamline costs and better align their business needs with IT capabilities .
In early 2015 Natixis was in the process of moving data centers and wanted to evaluate the public cloud as a possible alternative . The firm engaged CTP to conduct a proof of concept ( POC ) to learn whether AWS could provide the expected benefits to meet their needs . The POC was an indisputable success . After running several sample applications at an elevated speed and with the added ability to make changes without waiting on central IT , Natixis instantly recognized the value that would lead to increased speed to market , agility and turnaround time .
A Prescriptive Approach
Following their initial POC , Natixis dove into a full scale migration of their production workloads , working with CTP to ensure that all elements of the cloud ’ s networking , security and operational management were met on AWS . In adhering to CTP ’ s Cloud Adoption Program ( CAP ), the teams worked closely over the course of six months to conduct a Total Cost of Ownership ( TCO ) assessment , identify all legal and technical requirements , develop the necessary account structure , establish network connectivity , build a Minimum Viable Cloud ( MVC ) and address monitoring and operational concerns . They did all this before establishing a production environment that would take full advantage of multiple AWS services , including VPC , EC2 , S3 , Glacier , CloudWatch , SQS and CloudTrail .
Engaging Natixis ’ security , legal and compliance personnel , CTP ensured that access to the AWS production environment was ade-
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