JPMorgan is Committed to Cloud Computing

While describing their cloud computing strategy differently from other leading banks, JPMorgan has basically adopted the hybrid approach used by most top banks — though their strategy more aggressively involves deploying on four global cloud platforms.

J.P. Morgan Set to Run First Apps in Public Cloud

Published by Wall Street Journal March 30, 2017

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., after more than a year of testing offerings from large cloud providers, plans to go live Friday with its first two applications to run in the public cloud, global CIO Dana Deasy told CIO Journal.

Friday’s planned launch at J.P. Morgan marks Mr. Deasy’s growing confidence that public cloud vendors can handle the regulatory and security demands of the bank, which is the largest in the U.S. by assets and third-largest in the world.

The bank is moving applications in wholesale trading to public cloud infrastructure with a third application in risk modeling expected to go live in April, aiming to use the bursting capability of cloud computing to handle high-volume, complex computations at sometimes irregular intervals, he said.

“Public cloud is serious,” Mr. Deasy said. “It’s time to move.” He declined to say which specific applications will move to the cloud or identify which providers will host them.

J.P. Morgan made a purposeful exploration of cloud technology, Mr. Deasy said in an interview with CIO Journal. His technology team spent 2015 and 2016 assessing the capabilities, technology roadmaps, and economics of large public cloud vendors, as well as negotiating contracts, he said. While his staff was ready to explore cloud computing as early as 2014, public cloud providers at the time generally lacked “appropriate controls required in financial services for privacy and security,” he said. “They needed to mature their understanding of regulatory matters,” he said.

The two wholesale banking applications set to run on public cloud infrastructure manage trading transactions in a “large-scale and complex” environment, he said. The risk modeling application set to debut next month will make use of intensive computing power on demand, especially during high-volume periods, he said.

Cloud is a key element of an extensive overhaul of technology operations at J.P. Morgan, he said. While some companies move to the cloud to cut costs, Mr. Deasy doesn’t expect significant cost savings immediately. He sees bigger potential in making developers more efficient and in employing technologies such as machine learning and microservices that make it easier to run applications on any platform.

JPmorgan “All in” on Cloud Computing

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s April 2019 letter to shareholders

The power of the cloud is real. We were a little slow in adopting the cloud, for which I am partially responsible. My early thinking about the cloud was that it was just another term for outsourcing. I held firm to the view, which is somewhat still true, that we can run our own data centers, networks and applications as efficiently as anyone. But here’s the critical point: Cloud capabilities are far more extensive, and we are now full speed ahead.

Let me cite a couple of examples:

• The cloud gives us the ability to achieve rapid scale and elasticity of computing power exponentially beyond our own capacity. This will be especially relevant as we scale up our artificial intelligence efforts.
• The cloud platform is agile and flexible. It offers access to data sets, advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities beyond our own. It increases developers’ effectiveness by multiples – you can almost “click and drop” new elements into existing programs as opposed to writing extensive new code. For instance, adding databases and/or machine learning to an application can be done almost instantaneously. And certain tasks, such as testing code and provisioning compute power, are automated.
• The cloud provides a software development experience that is frictionless and allows our engineers to prototype quickly and learn fast, as well as increase the speed of delivering new capabilities to our customers and clients. It is important to note that the cloud has matured to the point where it can meet the high expectations that are set by large enterprises that have fairly intense demands around security, audit procedures, access to systems, cyber security and business resiliency.

We will be rapidly “refactoring” most of our applications to take full advantage of cloud computing. We then can decide whether it is more advantageous to run our applications on the external cloud or the internal cloud (the internal cloud will have many of the benefits of the external cloud’s scalable and efficient platforms).

One final but key issue: Agile platforms and cloud capabilities not only allow you to do

things much faster but also enable you to organize teams differently. You can create smaller teams of five to 20 people who can be continually reimagining, reinventing and rolling out new products and services in a few days instead of months.

JPMorgan Multi-Cloud Strategy

Published by JPMorgan Chase Corporate News

JPMorgan Chase is staffing up a cloud engineering center in Seattle, as it builds out one of the first global, multi-cloud computing platforms by a U.S. bank.

At the core of the company’s technology strategy is a multi-cloud platform. To deliver leading technology globally, driving innovation with emerging capabilities including blockchain, artificial intelligence, data analytics and digital currencies, JPMorgan Chase is using not one, but four global cloud platforms—the three biggest public clouds provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Azure—and its own private cloud.