November 20238 IN MYV EWCLOUDIFY ME, PLEASE.In the last few years, we have seen a push for cloudification of IT services in the financial industry. If you looked at the slide decks of all those Cloud providers, you'd notice that assured benefits of a cloudification investment can be summarized as higher operational resilience and great cost reductions. Talk to senior IT leaders in the APAC region about cloudification, and you, unsurprisingly, will recognize three lines of thought: enthusiasts, sceptics, and, finally, those that will share their distaste, convinced that this movement is a misstep.This latter group would argue that there is a growing number of PRs from digital native companies announcing they are abandoning partially or completely the Cloud to invest in their data centers. Those communications often come with a thorough, well-documented case study on why running your data center makes sense on several dimensions.Spend some time with any Cloud provider presales team, let them do a cloudification pre-study on your organization, and you'll end up with many documents suggesting colossal cost savings. It is only natural that senior IT leaders used to be sold a new panacea every five years cycle, grow now suspicious about the benefits of these cloudification initiatives.My colleagues and I believe that if we leave aside prejudices and look at the facts, we see evidence that the Cloud can potentially deliver immense benefits, including generous cost savings to a traditional financial services organization like ours. However, to attain most of those unrealized benefits, it is compulsory to adjust how the organization works, not just the IT part of the organization. Moving to the Cloud doesn't consist in matching the capabilities of the Cloud against our organization's current way of working; what we're looking for is something that will set up our organization to run in new David BejarBY DAVID BEJAR, HEAD OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, ALLIANZ INDONESIA
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