Cloud-first doesn't mean everything goes into the cloud, argues CIO
Tom Clark, CIO of Leeds Building Society, says that some systems must stay on-premise because cloud is simply more expensive
Having a cloud-first strategy doesn't necessarily mean that every new tool or system is automatically hosted in the cloud, because cloud can be more expensive.
That's the opinion of Tom Clark, CIO of Leeds Building Society. Speaking to Computing recently, Clark explained that some systems are better off on premises.
"Our core banking system is in the cloud," said Clark. "Our architecture strategy is very much cloud-first. When new projects come on board, we ask if we can take it as SaaS [Software as a Service]. If not, can we take it as PaaS [Platform as a Service] or IaaS [Infrastructure as a Service]? If not, then it's hosted in-house. We run VMWAre for most such services. So the question then is can we host that product within our premises, or in a private cloud? Only if it can't be hosted on VMWare, do we put it as a standalone piece of architecture," he added.
Clark said that this strategy is common in the financial sector, citing his peers at other big financial institutions who adopt the same approach.
"When we meet at conferences, my peers relate the same story. We're finding that when you have services with continuous levels of demand, the economics of cloud don't work. If you look at the total cost of ownership over five years, cloud is often too expensive. If you look at services where it has to cope with peaks and troughs, then cloud becomes more viable, but for banking, the load demand is pretty consistent. So sometimes we're seeing that cloud is not economically viable," he argued.
And this decision to take things in-house happens fairly frequently, with Clark stating that three new projects in 2017 have so far been designed to run on on-premises, standalone kit.
"It's things where we have high compute demand, where we're crunching lots of data for analysis, perhaps for reporting. Those things tend to drop out of the cloud," he said.
"We've tried and tested this approach through a number of projects, and it's typically cost that drives us away from cloud. From a virtual machine perspective, you could spin up an equivalent ourselves just as fast as you can from a cloud vendor," Clark argued.