Financial institutions are investing in cloud migration strategies to ensure operations are secure, modern and ready for technological innovation.

Cloud migration is an essential piece of Citi’s roadmap because of the bank’s global reach, Dmitri Furman, head of public cloud at Citi, said during the webinar “Best practices in cloud migration for financial services” hosted by Bank Automation News on Jan. 28.  

The $2.4 trillion Citi has established a cloud strategy through multicloud partnerships with Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services since offering services that are efficient and scaled is difficult to do completely on premises, Furman said.    

Watch the cloud migration webinar here 

Migration as a team sport

Citi takes a multi-pronged strategy to cloud migration where it bring together its technology teams like chief information officer’s team and business teams. 

To begin with, Citi’s cloud efforts require “top executive sponsorship to be successful,” Furman said.

The New York-based bank includes its business leaders and technology leaders in the decision-making process when determining which operations to move to the cloud, he said.  

Zac Maufe, managing director of global regulated industries at Google Cloud, agreed with the approach.  

Cloud migration is akin to a “team sport,” he said during the webinar. “Oftentimes, I see people get into challenges when it’s just a technology team’s job and there’s no one from the business [team] involved at all,” Maufe said. “That can be a little bit of a recipe for disaster.” 

Identifying eligible applications 

Next, identifying applications best suited for the cloud: When migrating applications to the cloud, the bank prioritizes applications that require high performance computing like cybersecurity efforts, Furman said.  

Also considered cloud-eligible: applications that require scalability. Applications that Citi has moved to the cloud include:  

• Document processing; 

• Document storage; and 

• Cybersecurity workloads. 

Flexibility is key 

Migrating to the cloud gives Citi’s innovation efforts elasticity, Furman said.

Running complex quantum risk calculations are possible on the cloud due to the high processing power required to run them at speed, a task that cannot be done on premises, he added.

The modernization required to run AI models can be done much faster in the cloud as the bank continues to migrate work to the cloud and unleash innovation on a global scale, Furman said. 

Selecting a vendor  

Citi selects cloud vendors that help it avoid a “concentration of risk” that could occur by having majority of operations with a sole cloud vendor, Furman said, noting that multiple clouds provides the banks with flexibility of architecture as well as increased security. 

Banks are careful to select cloud vendors that can help them attain a hybrid multicloud strategy; many FIs don’t want to get boxed into a cloud-only environment, Spencer Kimball, chief executive at New York-based fintech Cockroach Labs, said during the webinar. 

Continuous cloud migration 

Citi is continuously analyzing its portfolios to identify which applications should be migrated and where there are infrastructure gaps, Furman said. 

“We are on [an] iterative path to migrate large numbers of workloads to the public cloud, unleash the innovation and, hopefully, one day we could be fully native on the cloud,” Furman said. 

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