Bank of America’s Public Cloud Strategy

Having recently undergone an internal IT transformation from legacy to basically a private cloud infrastructure, Bank of America is very selective about using public cloud services that fit their innovation needs.

Why Bank of America is not using the public cloud

Published by Network World, March 7 2016

As Bank of America has undergone a massive transformation of its technical infrastructure during the past few years, there’s one emerging technology the financial firm is not using: IaaS public cloud.

In an interview with Bank of America CTO David Reilly I asked him if the bank uses the cloud in an organized, IT-driven manner. He basically said it’s not worth it. The bank has a big enough IT footprint that they don’t need to use the cloud.

It’s not purely an economic decision either. Reilly believes he can achieve the same, or close to the same, degree of flexibility and agility in his new software-defined, commodity-infrastructure powered greenfield IT environment compared to the public cloud.

Reilly says there’s no impediment from bank regulators restricting a move to the cloud, so public cloud resources could certainly be used one day. But even when public cloud providers discount their services in exchange for long-term contracts, it’s still not worth it for BofA to use them.

Of course Bank of America is a fairly unique organization. The company spends $3 billion annually on its infrastructure technology and has 100,000 technology workers at the company. For organizations that don’t have that type of infrastructure scale, Reilly admits the cloud could be a good fit.

Inside Bank of America’s IT transformation

Published by Network World, March 7, 2016

Bank of America had to get to a point where it is as agile, flexible and efficient as young, web-scale companies, Reilly believed. “It’s not enough to make what we’ve got better,” he concluded. “We actually have to get to a point where we could almost completely discard (our infrastructure) and move to a brand new, greenfield environment, unencumbered by any of the history or legacy of our existing footprint.”

Bank of America took a two-pronged approach to starting what Reilly calls the bank’s greenfield project. One path used a vendor’s proprietary infrastructure stack (Reilly would not disclose which provider). The other followed standards being developed by OCP (Open Compute Project) and other open source projects.

Both embrace software-defined infrastructure and follow core guiding principles: Compute, storage (and eventually network) resources are provisioned via APIs; applications use containers; and data centers are built in modular components.

“We’ve held a very hard line to say that the new cannot look like the old,” he says, even delaying the project at times to comply. The goal is to one day have a system built entirely on commodity servers that are uber-flexible: They could act as compute servers one day, a network switch another and be part of a pool of storage resources if needed. Containerized, micro services-designed applications automatically provision infrastructure resources they need without requiring any human hands in the process.

“We are now convinced that this software-defined model, where an application presents a manifest for the assets and facilities it needs, it acquires those assets with a call, uses them, then lets them go when they’re done so they can be used by someone else – that’s going to work for something like 80% of our technology workloads,” Reilly says.

Microsoft and Bank of America Collaborate With Azure Blockchain as a Service

Published on Bank Of America Newsroom September 27, 2016

Microsoft Corp. and Bank of America Merrill Lynch announced a collaboration on blockchain technology to fuel transformation of trade finance transacting.

As part of this collaboration, the two companies will build and test technology, create frameworks, and establish best practices for blockchain-powered exchanges between businesses and their customers and banks. Microsoft Treasury experts will serve as advisors and initial test clients, establishing the first Microsoft Azure-powered blockchain transaction between a major corporate treasury and financial institution.

“By working with Bank of America Merrill Lynch on cloud-based blockchain technology, we aim to increase efficiency and reduce risk in our own treasury operations,” said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Microsoft. “Businesses across the globe – including Microsoft – are undergoing digital transformation to grow, compete, and be more agile, and we see significant potential for blockchain to drive this transformation.”

Currently, underlying trade finance processes are highly manual, time-consuming and costly. With blockchain, processes can be digitized and automated, transaction settlement times shortened, and business logic applied to related data, creating a host of potential benefits for businesses and financial institutions including: more predictable working capital, reduced counterparty risk, improved operational efficiency, and enhanced audit transparency, among other benefits.

“The potential benefits of blockchain will help drive meaningful supply chain efficiencies to the clients of both Microsoft and the bank. This project is another example of our continued commitment to introduce financial innovations for the betterment of global commerce,” said Ather Williams, head of Global Transaction Services at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. 

Bank of America moves to the Microsoft Cloud

Published by ON MFST October 2, 2017

Bank of America will take advantage of the combined power of the Microsoft Cloud for business transformation. Microsoft Office 365 will provide modern, cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools to some of the bank’s 200,000 employees. The firm will also utilize Microsoft Azure, capitalizing on the scale, economics and intelligent capabilities of the platform and services.

“We are aggressively modernizing our technology infrastructure to enable current and future growth across all our lines of business,” said Howard Boville, chief technology officer at Bank of America in a press release. “Our agreement with Microsoft aligns to our target of delivering 80 percent of our technology workloads on virtual platforms within the next several years, further establishing Bank of America as a digital leader in financial services.”