TATRA BANKA & ORBIT

On the way to the cloud, it’s not enough to know “where to go”. We need to know where we are starting from, which way to go, at what pace and how to prepare for the journey. And it is these questions that the cloud strategy and roadmap answers. One such set of travel documents was prepared by Tatra banka at the beginning of its “cloud journey”.

“Why a cloud strategy with ORBIT? We felt the need to have something more than just a migration roadmap. We wanted to look at the cloud topic more globally, to make it ‘all of us’ and not just IT’s basis for application migrations.

ORBIT brought us a broader view of the cloud from other companies. They have helped us start the cloud journey faster and address issues more efficiently to set the cloud as an innovative platform for its subscribers.”

Ivana Fabianová, Head of IT Application support, Tatra banka

Tatra banka, currently the 16th Slovak Bank of the Year, has developed into a Central European leader in asset management and corporate and private banking over more than 30 years of its existence. It is part of the Austrian banking group RBI Group and is trusted by one million clients.

By the time Tatra banka received the award for the World’s most innovative consumer digital bank for 2019 from Global Finance magazine, it was already intensively interested in greater use of cloud services.

It was motivated by the expectation of faster delivery to clients, the use of innovative technologies, increasing and supporting the agility of the entire bank and, last but not least, by the Austrian management itself, which defined the objectives of using the cloud.

The specific shape of the cloud strategy and roadmap is different for each company. It is based on the current state of technology, applications, IT teams, processes and security. Even in the case of Tatra banka, it will result in a specific set of rules, tasks and objectives that can be implemented in practice.

Tatra banka entrusted the development of the cloud strategy and roadmap to ORBIT after a demanding tender process. As far as we know, our proven competencies, previous experience in creating cloud strategies and the robust Cloud Journey framework that we were ready to apply to the entire project decided in our favour.

The six-month project can be divided into three main phases.

In the first phase, we evaluated the cloud maturity of teams and processes, the suitability of the application portfolio for the cloud and the current use of cloud technologies. The higher the cloud maturity (maturity) of an organization’s teams and processes, the better the company can manage the cloud, reap the benefits and minimize the risks.

What is a company’s cloud maturity and how is it determined? That is the subject of this article.

We analyzed the entire application portfolio (in terms of suitability for migration to the cloud) and identified bottlenecks in the IT organization, processes, architecture and applications with respect to the required target cloud maturity.

Together with the IT team of Tatra banka, I analyzed the use of cloud technologies of the AWS platform and the level of their adoption by individual IT teams. In other words, at this stage we have said “where are we and where are we going”.

The second phase of the project consisted of more than 100 meetings with individual teams, during which we discussed and implemented individual agendas in detail:

• possibilities of cloud coexistence with on-premise IT,
• the bank’s access to the cloud and what it wants to use it for,
• how the cloud will support agile transformation,
• creation of a cloud team and its interaction with other IT teams,
• setting up the AWS landing zone and necessary processes,
• cloud architecture principles (blueprints) and preferred technologies,
• blueprints for operational and safety monitoring,
• integration of DevOps with AWS and use of IaC (Infrastructure as Code),
• PoC applications and deployment automation.

This phase involved a total of about 50 people on both sides.

Based on the steps and goals we agreed on in the previous phase, we finally formulated the final version of the cloud strategy for Tatra banka. This was followed by the development of a roadmap – a detailed plan of how to implement the strategy over the next three years – including implementation requirements and costs.

A glimpse behind the scenes: we worked on the final version of the cloud strategy 24/7 without exaggeration. One of our team members was staying in Thailand and the time shift allowed us to work continuously on the documentary.

The scope and complexity of the project ultimately resulted in a two-month delay in the project completion date, which fortunately was not a reason for client dissatisfaction. Tatra banka adopted the proposed cloud strategy with its 292 pages and started to follow it. The subsequent migration of AWS applications is also in line with the cloud strategy.

A physical meeting of the entire implementation team was only possible at the end of the project, when the constraints of the covid-19 pandemic had subsided.

The cloud strategy has fulfilled its purpose and enables Tatra banka to use the AWS cloud effectively. Thanks to the cloud strategy, Tatra banka and its IT team are prepared for future challenges related to the use of cloud technologies (in terms of technical, procedural, organisational, security and legislative aspects). The framework resulting from the strategy is and will be actively applied in all ongoing cloud projects.

“The use of the cloud is a key aspect for Tatra banka in supporting innovation and increasing the agility of the entire bank. At the same time, IT leadership was aware that cloud adoption is a major change in IT that needs to be well prepared for with a cloud strategy and roadmap.”

 

Lukáš Klášterský, Digital Principal Consultant,

Want to learn more about creating a cloud strategy and roadmap? Read about it in this article in our Cloud Encyclopedia.