What CIOs Can Learn From Bank of America’s Trip Into The Cloud
Imagine if you were David Reilly, chief technology officer at Bank of America. You are responsible for the IT infrastructure of one of the largest banks when suddenly the IT world begins to undergo another of its changes. What do you think you should do? Remain steadfast and adhere to the tried-and-true solution that is in place or be willing to try something new? The answer is that David is open to making adjustments, but he has to be careful.
Why is it essential to make a change now?
If you were in charge of that CIO job at one of the significant American banks, there would be a lot happening. Modern banks have several moving parts: commercial banking as well as investment management, loans as well as consumer service. To ensure that everything is running as it should and also to keep track of everything for regulators, you’re going to require a vast IT infrastructure. This wasn’t a simple infrastructure on the spot; instead, you’ve been building it for a long time.
What that means is that you’re currently on an assortment of outdated technologies being utilized to run your company. The client/server infrastructure of yesterday is the one that most of your most popular applications were designed to work with. What does this means to your business is that a significant amount of your support personnel is doing their best to keep your hardware and software version up-to-date?
If you took an examination of the data centers Bank of America is currently operating, you’d find that the equipment they use is divided. At present, hardware is assigned to each line of business. This has resulted in an abundance of wasted time and inefficiency within the center for data. The mortgage department of the bank might only require lots of processing during the primary season for home purchases, and the capacity will be inactive for the remainder of the year.
Which Bank of America Wants From The Cloud
Bank of America has been paying close attention to what’s been happening throughout the IT sector. Since Facebook, as well as Google, has opened new data centers to accommodate their ever-growing need to increase their computing power, The bank has looked into how they went to accomplish this. The thing that Bank of America really wants is to expand its IT infrastructure and also reduce the costs of providing it.
The aim of the Bank of America has to establish an IT infrastructure that the various banking divisions utilize. The thought is the infrastructure shared will enable the bank to perform more computing with less hardware. Bank of America also thinks that they will be capable of replacing their old hardware with more affordable computers that run in the x86 architecture and that have more up-to-date software. This new architecture will enable the bank to change the purpose of its servers after they have shut down an application.
One major issue Bank of America needs to figure out is how they’re going to be able to show their auditors that they’re securely handling sensitive information. With their new structure, their data will no more be stored in a single location and will be distributed across their entire network. Another goal the bank is trying to achieve is to maximize the use of its employees. The bank currently has one administrator for managing around 300 servers. They’d like to get more similar to Facebook, which uses a single system administrator to oversee the 20,000 servers.
What Does This All Mean What Does This Mean For What Does This Mean For
The CIO at Bank of America finds himself in a unique spot. He has developed the IT infrastructure that serves the bank effectively. However, the writing is already on the wall – technology in IT is evolving, so if the institution is going to be able to stay ahead of the curve with the latest technology, they will have to for some radical changes. The aim is to discover ways to enable the bank to perform more for less.
As Bank of America’s data center, IT infrastructure has been built; hardware is assigned to specific functions within the bank. This doesn’t allow for the hardware to be shared among various parts within the institution. The bank would like to develop an infrastructure shared by all of them that allows the bank to more efficiently use their hardware. They plan to make use of the latest, more affordable hardware that allows them to upgrade their existing hardware.
The positive side is the fact that this bank seems to be heading in the proper direction. It won’t be easy to replace their current technology infrastructure with a thoroughly modern shared system. If the bank is prepared to put in the time and money to make this happen right now, it’ll be ready for anything that happens in the future.
