On the way to the cloud, it's not enough to know "where to go". You need to know where you are starting from, which way to go, at what pace and how to prepare for the journey. These are the questions that a cloud strategy and roadmap answers. Tatra banka had one such set of travel documents prepared by us at the beginning of its "cloud journey".
Tatra banka at the crossroads
Tatra Bank, currently the 16th Slovak Bank of the Year, has developed into a Central European leader in asset management and corporate and private banking over more than 30 years of its existence. It is part of the Austrian banking group RBI Group and has the trust of one million clients.
At the time when Tatra banka received the award for World's most innovative consumer digital bank for 2019, has already taken a keen interest in greater use of cloud services.
It was motivated by the expectation of faster delivery to clients, the use of innovative technologies, increasing and supporting the agility of the entire bank and, last but not least, by the Austrian management itself, which defined the objectives of using the cloud.
Quo vadis, Tatra banka?
Concrete form cloud strategy and roadmaps is different for every company. It is based on the current state of technology, applications, IT teams, processes and security. Even in the case of Tatra banka, it results in a specific a set of rules, tasks and actionable objectives.
After a challenging tender process, Tatra banka entrusted the development of the cloud strategy and roadmap to ORBIT. As far as we know, they decided in our favour demonstrable competences, previous experience in creating cloud strategies and a robust framework Cloud Journeywhich we were ready to apply to the whole project.
How the cloud strategy and roadmap was created
The six-month project can be divided into three main phases.
1) Assessment and identification of bottlenecks
In the first phase, we evaluated the cloud maturity of teams and processes, the suitability of the application portfolio for the cloud and the current use of cloud technologies. It is true that the cloud maturity (maturity) of an organization's teams and processes is higher, the better a company can manage the cloud, reap the benefits and minimize the risks.
What is a company's cloud maturity and how is it determined? This is the subject of this article.
We analyzed the entire application portfolio (in terms of suitability for migration to the cloud) and identified bottlenecks in the IT organization, processes, architecture and applications with respect to the required target cloud maturity.
Together with Tatra banka's IT team we analysed use of cloud technologies of the AWS platform and their adoption rate by individual IT teams. In other words, at this stage we have said "where are we and where are we going".
2) Naming and developing cloud focused areas
The second phase of the project consisted of more than 100 meetings with individual teamswhere we discussed and implemented the individual agendas in detail:
- possibilities of cloud coexistence with on-premise IT,
- the bank's access to the cloud and what it wants to use it for,
- how the cloud will support agile transformation,
- creation of a cloud team and its interaction with other IT teams,
- setting up the AWS landing zone and necessary processes,
- cloud architecture principles (blueprints) and preferred technologies,
- blueprints for operational and safety monitoring,
- DevOps integration with AWS and the use of IaC (Infrastructure as Code),
- PoC applications and deployment automation.
A total of about 50 people on both sides were involved in this phase.
3) Formulating a cloud strategy and roadmap
Based on the steps and objectives we agreed on in the previous phase, we finally formulated the following for Tatra banka the final version of the cloud strategy. This was followed by the creation of a roadmap - a detailed a plan to implement this strategy over the next three years - including the complexity of implementation and cost.
A glimpse behind the scenes: we worked on the final version of the cloud strategy 24/7. One of our team members was in Thailand and the time shift allowed us to work on the document around the clock.
Cloud strategy and roadmap comes to life
The scope and complexity of the project ultimately resulted in a two-month delay in the project completion date, which fortunately was not a reason for client dissatisfaction. The proposed cloud strategy with its 292 pages Tatra banka has accepted as its own and she started to follow it. The subsequent migration of AWS applications is also in line with the cloud strategy.
The physical meeting of the entire implementation team was only possible at the end of the project, when the constraints associated with the covid-19 pandemic had subsided.
Cloud strategy has fulfilled its purpose and enables Tatra banka to effectively use especially AWS cloud. Tatra banka and its IT team is thanks to the cloud strategy prepared for future challenges related to the use of cloud technologies (in terms of technical, procedural, organisational, security and legislative aspects). The framework resulting from the strategy is and will be actively applied in all running cloud projects.
Want to learn more about creating a cloud strategy and roadmap? Read about it in this article our Cloud Encyclopedia.
