A great many articles have been written on innovation. Rather than contribute to the overall body of literature, we'd like to focus on one important enabler: access (or lack thereof) to cloud computing resources.
Why nitpick on such a specific topic? Because we don't see it mentioned enough and time and time again it's one of the greatest hurdles we face, especially in the financial services industry.
If we segment companies into 2 distinct groups - the "haves" and "have-nots" of cloud computing - we observe drastically different expectations with respect to the speed of IT innovation.
When we ask a "haves" company (approx. 30% those we know) if they can give us access to a prototyping environment, they'll usually shrug and say "Sure. Is tomorrow OK? How much RAM and storage space do you need?" And that's great, and we can start the next day.
When we ask the same question to a "have nots" company, the response is a cold icy stare followed by something like "Sure, why don't we schedule a meeting in 10 years to finalize the details, it will likely cost 20,000$, and we first need to get this huge bureaucratic process out of the way". And that's not great, and we're basically stuck.
We should back-up here and explain why cloud computing is important. In a nutshell it provides the necessary infrastructure for innovation: the aforementioned rapid prototyping environment.
IT innovation doesn't happen on end-user applications such as Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint. You need server technologies to build 24/7 responsive services, sustainable data repositories, intuitive web-interfaces, embedded workflows. Prototyping servers are no longer provided as physical machines that you store in office corners, rather they are virtual and served from a company's cloud.
Imagine an application that is able to receive an address list via email, corrects & validates these addresses using a Swiss address API and finally generates an output file ready for back-end lead-management systems. This is a typical use-case for a short innovation cycle (one we recently completed), impossible to run on a laptop but takes 5 minutes to deploy on a virtual server (or container).
Why not just use a public cloud provider such as AWS if the company isn't ready? Financial services companies are rightfully restrictive about their customer data, therefore careful design needs to be applied to set-up a cloud that enables secure virtual environments before it can be used for prototyping.
We're not advocating for a complete shift to cloud computing (not required), nor what the best mix of public versus private cloud is (it depends), nor the best technology to get there (we like Kubernetes/Docker, there are alternatives). What we are advocating for is that any bank or insurance should be able, within days, to provide a secured virtual environment where its teams can prototype and experiment. Cloud computing technologies have drastically matured over the last 10 years (fueled by the rise of AWS, Google Cloud and many others). Configuring a functional and secure private/public cloud is within the reach of any company.
Cloud computing gives you the means to prototype, to experiment, to innovate in a secured environment. Please, if you are a company where securing cloud resources takes more than 2 weeks: someone in IT needs to tackle this head-on. Competitors are moving, customer expectations are rising, and Excel can only get you so far. If you need help getting organized and setting things up, please contact us.
Why nitpick on such a specific topic? Because we don't see it mentioned enough and time and time again it's one of the greatest hurdles we face, especially in the financial services industry.
If we segment companies into 2 distinct groups - the "haves" and "have-nots" of cloud computing - we observe drastically different expectations with respect to the speed of IT innovation.
When we ask a "haves" company (approx. 30% those we know) if they can give us access to a prototyping environment, they'll usually shrug and say "Sure. Is tomorrow OK? How much RAM and storage space do you need?" And that's great, and we can start the next day.
When we ask the same question to a "have nots" company, the response is a cold icy stare followed by something like "Sure, why don't we schedule a meeting in 10 years to finalize the details, it will likely cost 20,000$, and we first need to get this huge bureaucratic process out of the way". And that's not great, and we're basically stuck.
We should back-up here and explain why cloud computing is important. In a nutshell it provides the necessary infrastructure for innovation: the aforementioned rapid prototyping environment.
IT innovation doesn't happen on end-user applications such as Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint. You need server technologies to build 24/7 responsive services, sustainable data repositories, intuitive web-interfaces, embedded workflows. Prototyping servers are no longer provided as physical machines that you store in office corners, rather they are virtual and served from a company's cloud.
Imagine an application that is able to receive an address list via email, corrects & validates these addresses using a Swiss address API and finally generates an output file ready for back-end lead-management systems. This is a typical use-case for a short innovation cycle (one we recently completed), impossible to run on a laptop but takes 5 minutes to deploy on a virtual server (or container).
Why not just use a public cloud provider such as AWS if the company isn't ready? Financial services companies are rightfully restrictive about their customer data, therefore careful design needs to be applied to set-up a cloud that enables secure virtual environments before it can be used for prototyping.
We're not advocating for a complete shift to cloud computing (not required), nor what the best mix of public versus private cloud is (it depends), nor the best technology to get there (we like Kubernetes/Docker, there are alternatives). What we are advocating for is that any bank or insurance should be able, within days, to provide a secured virtual environment where its teams can prototype and experiment. Cloud computing technologies have drastically matured over the last 10 years (fueled by the rise of AWS, Google Cloud and many others). Configuring a functional and secure private/public cloud is within the reach of any company.
Cloud computing gives you the means to prototype, to experiment, to innovate in a secured environment. Please, if you are a company where securing cloud resources takes more than 2 weeks: someone in IT needs to tackle this head-on. Competitors are moving, customer expectations are rising, and Excel can only get you so far. If you need help getting organized and setting things up, please contact us.