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welcome to our panel discussion around the theme of the experiences and challenges of adopting cloud in the banking industry now cloud has become a way of consuming infrastructure platforms and applications and services it has it has democratized the power of competing and has disrupted every other industry by providing the power of competing storage network and analytics at the hands of non-traditional players and startups however banking industry is a highly regulated industry and faces unique challenges in the adoption of cloud and is getting disrupted by a fintech players now in this forum we will try to understand the challenges the banking industry faces in cloud adoption and how they can be avoided and also the pitfalls of cloud vendor lock-in now welcome to the experiences and challenges of adopting cloud in the banking industry panel discussion by ashnik today we are very delighted to have great people with us i would like to welcome our esteemed panelist mr ariel roda who is a chief information officer and head of information technology group of philippine bank of communications which is pb com bank mr ariel he is a senior management professional with extensive c-level leadership experience in technology and business transformation initiatives across several industries including utilities banking telecommunications gas oil and information technology he is currently the cio and iit group head of philippines bank of communications pb com bank i also have with me mr ramos abasolo who is a svp and chief digital officer of robinson's bank with more than 35 years of banking and technology experience mr ramon is now driving key digital initiatives in robinson's bank in 2020 we as we all know despite the pandemic and the lockdowns robinson bank has successfully launched several digital services among these are a full fully digital customer acquisition app called sign up and a newly upgraded online banking system that is run in the cloud uh again welcome to both of you to this esteem panel discussion around cloud and its challenges welcome thank you welcome yeah thank you thank you okay so uh we will start with our panel discussion uh uh ariel and ramon so uh as you both know the panel discussion is around the cloud and its challenges before i start with my questions if you would like to give a little bit of introduction about your journey so far uh on the cloud for your organization your experiences and then we can shift the gears on the actual questions so uh ariel you would like to start first with the your bank journey on the cloud first oh thank you thank you kp so so glad to be here thank you for inviting us um well as far as our cloud journey is concerned it's uh still a short journey so we've been on the cloud for probably a little over uh 12 months uh okay so we have our chat bought on the cloud we also have our core banking system uh on the cloud so we've been working with a few uh vendor partners who have allowed us to move and take advantage of uh cloud services and there are many pros and cons about this and this is something that i probably have a chance to share uh later on uh with the with you and the audience um so there are many challenges uh we're still struggling yeah we will constantly struggling i i i won't deny that it's uh it's not an easy path it's not an easy journey and i'm sure one would have its own set of challenges as it is with the not only the the rest of the banking industry but uh other industries as well uh it's still evolving as far as cloud service providers are concerned i think they're also trying to um improve uh the way they've been offering their services and that means uh you know many changes as well in the offering itself and even in the way sure so mr ramon over to you if you can share so far you are journey on uh cloud on cloud for your organization okay thank you thank you also for having me here um robinson's bank actually started its cloud journey with the software as a service initiative with our credit card provider so that was a uh our first a foray into into a cloud with a software as a service then we moved to a platform as a service and we started first with our development and testing environment for the [Music] online banking app so we started with that and it was also to test the waters with um with our central bank with our board and with our senior managers just to gauge uh the appetite it was very promising they were very excited that we were entering into the cloud environment and then just recently as in just a few months ago we implemented our online banking app our entire online banking suite so both browser-based and mobile app right right in the cloud with the uh infrastructure infrastructure as a service type of um of engagement and yes we've had our own challenges um we're still getting used to the concept of an environment that is not on premise and um start of delegating a lot of the management and operational aspects to uh to a third party and we're learning on the way we're learning things about the it brings it brings its own set of opportunities and its own set of challenges so it's been interesting and i don't think we will go back to the way we used to work when we were managing our own infrastructure great great so uh great to get this perspective from both of you in terms of your overall cloud journey so far now coming about uh or talking about the specifics of the challenges i would like to know so far in your journey and even going in the future of your cloud migration journey what three key challenges that you have faced or you foresee that you will face in the upcoming years for your organization and i would like to ask this first to uh mr ramon if you can give some uh three key challenges that you faced or foresee that you will definitely face well one challenge that all of us thought would be a huge challenge that ended up not as major a challenge as we thought was our central bank we we we were worried that the central bank would give us a lot of hurdles a lot of challenges a lot of paperwork but it came out they are quite open and they're quite open to even and i guess pb home can attest to it even the core bank with all its customer information on the cloud so that was one challenge that we all thought would be a problem came out to be not much of a problem uh the other challenges of course is the the the change of culture within within the iep organization where now their skill sets would have to change from actually from managing infrastructure hardware to service level agreement management and outsourcing management and i guess the last challenge is that we did we did learn of um a lot of other things that we thought were part of the cloud engagement items like disaster recovery um even network there are some aspects of the network that we also learned throughout this journey so i guess now that we've gotten our feet wet now that we've learned how to how to handle those challenges we just we predict it will be smoother along the way but what are the other challenges we would foresee i guess because we just recently moved we will now go about the challenge now of testing the dr environment to see how how it goes about and how it will be run and i guess the other challenge will happen is i'm pretty sure there will be a there will there will come a time when we will have to move cloud providers and that will set its own challenges and so we're also trying to make it try to make it as seamless and as quick and as yeah as as strong as abstract as possible to our to our customers we do have certain technologies you know uh container technologies but we're still not sure if that will actually work when we move from one environment to the other okay okay uh mr ariel if you can share some additional challenges that you have faced for ppcom bank well i i shared the same set of uh of uh surprises with one here i really thought uh bsp or the central bank would would really be a challenge but surprisingly they've been very supportive in fact they're the ones who've been pushing a lot of us in this industry to adapt more uh technologies uh all in the name of uh inclusivity um plus the fact that uh i'm so happy and i'm proud that my senior management and my board of directors uh led by our president miss may cs and our ceo john medina has been very supportive of cloud initiatives but having said that internal to i.t because i have a very small team i've roughly just about 50-plus people uh so this is the poor team that that has been managing a lot of our partner vendors and providers so the key challenges are actually the familiarity with and the difference is then scale of skill sets to uh fully understand you know everything about the cloud so uh each day there have been uh developments as well in that area which is not only a challenge for the vendors but they're also struggling how to explain best to uh you know how to explain that to us as potential customers a second would be i think a challenge in uh in crafting an appropriate business case okay uh to be able to bring up to management and justify an investment either in ias pass or even be passed so we're seriously looking at business processes as a service as well in the cloud um and the third would be the the specific challenges in uh in integration so i i would suppose if you bring up an application on the cloud that's uh standalone uh not too too much of a of a worry right but once you have that same application uh for example our core banking uh interface with 40 other applications it presents an entirely new set of challenges as well and and i'm sure my my colleague one will attest to that so it's it's an ongoing challenge as well uh and unfortunately or unfortunately the cloud service providers are also uh i guess just a few pages ahead of us if you ask me and i'm sure mom will attest to that yes [Laughter] they're just maybe and i guess to the audience is that you need if you're going to engage with a cloud provider you need a cloud provider who will give you the best support that they can we understand they probably and they're also not familiar but they really have to give give good support we've had our own problems and fortunately we had a good cloud provider and they were very quick to provide solutions okay great great to know that and in fact it was very encouraging to hear from both of you that the central bank of philippines has been very supportive of cloud initiatives and i am seeing this across asean region where in fact the central banks in every country they have been very open and they have been very forefront in terms of giving out their policies which were very pro cloud and encouraging all the banking customers to adopt cloud very aggressively which was very good very good to see yeah and i think good that you highlighted the key challenges that both of you have faced so far and forcing the that there will be some more challenges coming up and it's just a start so in terms of planning to address those uh problems in the future how are you aligning your teams your processes your organizational culture for example within your organizations to basically handle these challenges that you foresee if you can shade some lights on that and share with our viewers so maybe uh ariel you want to go first okay well first we we have to review the entire operating environment right and and specifically for the bank i work for uh become so it calls for uh simplification of processes so if there have been you know quite a good number of processes that have been manual based in the past so it's a good opportunity now to simplify maybe do away with you know many duplicative processes and maybe automate it if to a point we can do straight through processing uh even better uh starting with the self-service perspective on the part of the customer right and delight them with the new journey uh and i think that sort of environment as a precursor would make it a little easier to move stuff from on-premise uh to the cloud okay because it also simplifies a lot of of how we could properly manage that new environment the other area would be training so we're still struggling with trainings you know if you have a small shop and you have a lot of bau uh responsibilities the the time you know allocated to trainings might be deprioritized a bit or deferred so that's another challenge so that calls for a vendor partner or a cloud service provider that's very patient right and also helping us navigate with limited or not as deep knowledge on the cloud as they are uh we're also looking at a lot of uh proofs of value uh it's no longer proofs of concept that uh we demand it's really pov because i would like to think that a cloud opportunity for a much much larger bank might bring back a different set of advantages than a smaller bank like bbcom so we we always work with we try to work with the cloud service providers who are willing to uh do a four to six week proof of value uh engagement with us so that it also teaches us uh you know side by side uh with the vendor how best to go about a particular implementation or a challenge for example okay um and lastly we we would like to you know we appreciate cloud service providers who really take the time to go with us on a walkthrough okay so so uh whether it's you know the intricacies of of dockers or or microservices or how best to do uh you know multiple databases and and so on or apis uh or even uh that particular site of cloud that's not often part of the initial discussion which is security so so there are times when we'd like to put something on the cloud and it turns out that that particular application has to shoulder the brunt of other investments and then when you do the business case it may no longer you know look attractive that one application would also have to shoulder maybe ten times you know more uh expenses than having a full you know uh suite of applications on the cloud so those are the areas that uh that we're doing right now to be able to uh keep abreast okay of the advantages i really liked your point of proof of values i think many customers are adopting a proof of value concept rather than proof of uh your poc i'm sure that you know those things have worked in other countries it's really just trying to reconfirm if they're as valuable to us as it is with the with their objectives correct uh what do you uh mr ramon if you can add a few more yeah i i also like ariel's uh term of proof of value because a lot of vendors they do proof concept but they don't have they just showcase their their tool what i try to pivot the vendor to is they have to have their own stake in the game the thing that we call it you have to show skin in the game so if it doesn't work i mean they have to have some um how would you say they have to be part of the team they they stand to lose maybe not as much as the bank if it fails but they have to have skin in the game i guess yeah everything that ariel mentioned yeah it's the same for us um the other thing i will add to that is aside from the what what he mentioned about learnings and cult and training um we also need a proper debugging and isolation and monitoring tools because what we're seeing the solutions now become fragmented and it's even possible that a solution will reside in one cloud provider while another solution will reside in another cloud provider pbcom is so bold that they put their core back in the cloud first so what we're seeing is that if there's a problem because the solutions are fragmented you're already the the the the isolation and the monitoring and the problem resolution becomes quite a challenge because you're now there are some aspects which are abstracted from you so you're no long and you need the proper tools to track how network connections happen how messages flow from one system to another and the quicker we have those tools available the quicker uh problem the whatever incidents will happen will be resolved then yes there will be incidents intermittent connections response time connections yeah those are the challenges but if you have the good people you have good people good provider good tools you will eventually solve all that correct correct and i i think both of you mentioned that uh the cloud v ndor or cloud partner needs to have skin in the game i think that's a very important point because you don't need just somebody who is providing services but you need somebody who is going to partner with you throughout this journey because it's a different journey for all the organization it's a complete shift in paradigm where they are shifting from on-premises models to other service models on cloud so there you got a right point in terms of you are looking for right partners who are going together with you in this journey so my next question is also related to that where uh how you are going to avoid or look at ways to avoid any particular cloud vendor lock-ins because inadvertently some cloud providers would be good at some services whereas some other cloud provider could be good in other services so it may end up having multi-cloud strategy for your organization so how you are going to plan for it are you choosing the right technologies to avoid vendor lock-ins right away when you are deciding your strategies so mr rawan if you would like to add a few points on that yeah that that that was a concern of ours when we yeah we started to embark in this journey so we had to design or architect the solution uh and i i have to defer to the really tech guys but i think the they were able to design it like a container or they were able to containerize the the application so that theoretically it should be portable to any cloud provider in case the cloud provider in case we this decide to disengage with our current one we haven't tested that that theory yet but they the the vendor was able they claimed they designed it and architected our solution that way so i guess that's one way because there will always be another cloud provider that is better than your current one and i guess we just need to make sure we're flexible that we will be able to shift to another cloud provider as quick as possible some some might quote like six to nine months that for me is not not success not acceptable to to shift it should be months or even even a quarter so that's that's how we prevent vendor lock-in but fortunately they're just a few few players right now um we haven't gotten into a situation where we were unhappy with the cloud provider and we had to shift right away but i suspect somewhere down the road we will encounter that right right right so mr ariel if you would like to add a few cents here yeah well i i haven't gone that far down the cloud journey to really worry about uh uh lock-ins right uh so as i said we're quite new to uh to the game um and what i've been focusing on right now would be uh the slas so the service level agreements i think there's a lot to learn from um how many of the cloud service providers have different sets of slas right depending on how you're engaging them uh the most complex would probably be a managed service uh arrangement and that and i think one alluded to that uh there will always be problems associated with outages you know maybe not even enough resources that are dynamically allocated when you expect them uh to be there when the volume or or the scale uh picks up right um so we're still uh uh trying to refine uh the slas uh and and uh fortunately our vendor partners have been open uh to continuous improvement in that area the other part would be uh a a concern right now on my part on what conditions might warrant an exit right uh for if if certain uh pre-agreements have been breached or are not being met what would allow me to actually decoupled myself from from that cloud service provider so right now i have not really encountered any you know critical issues that would require me to make that decision but i'd like to think i should be ready to be able to uh tap that option if and when i become big enough and it becomes a little bit more complicated that another vendor can step in and say you know what uh earlier i can do a better job okay that's so that's uh what i'm preparing for sure and i think uh one of you already mentioned that uh how we are looking at containers to basically make sure that uh whether you move to from one cloud provider to another cloud provider in the future or even today if you are running some workloads on premises so just another challenge i'd like to think that's another challenge if it's an existing application the time you know many years ago right getting some old fashioned programming language and you're trying to push it on the cloud then it would have its own set of challenges don't go don't go beyond maybe try try to keep that contract into one year three years is probably the the max that you would you would go to if they want to lock in for five years i that one i'm not sure anymore the typical yeah one year good advice good advice good advice yes yeah absolutely so uh i think containers are such technologies are going to play a very important role in your adoption of multi-cloud strategy as you mentioned uh but any other particular tools technologies that you are looking at or especially on the cloud adoption side uh is your cloud adoption only targeted towards infrastructure as a service or are you looking to expand it beyond that and looking at some platforms to be used or consumed as services or some software's also to be consumed as services on your preferred uh cloud vendor today so how are you actually planning that navigation on the cloud if any anybody any one of you can start on that um i i guess on our side it's always cloud first is the solution that we will look at so if we're looking for a solution that before before before cloud came it was either a build or buy type of solution whereby you see it's always on premise got it now with cloud even certain components like api gateways uh etl tools for data those that are not business type of software but not really infrastructure type uh solutions we try to see if we can do it on the cloud and if it is much cheaper and much more efficient so i guess that's that that's what we're looking at as well but yeah that's what we're looking at as well but the reality is everything that's on the cloud sometimes may not be as uh may not be as value level you know they're not as cost efficient as what some people might might claim there are situations where on-premise will still be uh best bang for your for your buck okay okay absolutely uh anything uh from you ariel if you want to add how are you looking at it past kind of solutions on sas i agree with mon uh we looked at cloud first right or any new requirements uh what's up there is there anything hosted already where are the other industries uh going with who are they going with for example so i guess one of my advantages is i've worked for five other industries so i can you know get best of breed let's say if it's a c-cast our customer contact center for example as a service similar to a telco or any other weather so we try to get recommendations and see what's out there uh that i can immediately have on the cloud so right now it's uh building it is last priority unless it's unless it's so compelling okay okay right that i think it's a differentiator for us to actually go that route uh but if not then i'll just go with the you know run-of-the-mill best in class you know best practice uh software that i can subscribe to so one curious question here to both of you so uh when you're saying it's cloud first approach that both of your organizations is adopting right now so are there no more concerns in terms of your data residing on cloud so all these concerns are already settled uh for your organizations within the industry is that what you're referring to well in our case we have to also seek first uh seek the regulator's approval i don't know if that's now across you know all the banks but uh i i suppose the regulators would still require each bank to go through the process okay of explaining right uh what exactly is it that you want to do with the with your cloud partner okay yeah and if probably all their conditions are met then that's when they either tell you they post no objection or go ahead and pursue that path for for my side our management is very really encourages cloud in fact every time we make a presentation on where to host our management will insist that cloud is part of the proposal before it before it was we had to justify moving it to the cloud now it's like you have to justify why you're putting it on premise but to your point data is of course is still a concern but because of the shift of a cloud first philosophy we cannot go to management and say we don't want to move it into into the cloud because of data confidentiality that we can't go with that position because if we do our management will say that's a problem you have to solve the the the the there should be no excuse why we cannot host it in the cloud especially now that we know bbcom has hosted their car bank in the cloud more all the more we cannot uh all the more that we we can't give that can't give that excuse so my management will always say how do you protect against uh uh hacking or people um grabbing huge uh loads of or doing data dumps so we have to address that there's no situation where i cannot protect it therefore take it out of the cloud that is not an option that is not an option for us okay okay great great to know your thoughts both of you and i would like to just summarize what i have learned personally and what our viewers can look forward to from this session so some very key important aspects that came from this uh discussion was of course you are looking for cloud especially our robinson bank and pbcom bank both have started their cloud adoption journey for quite some time especially pbcom bank has already hosted their core banking application on cloud which is very very encouraging for other banks that are looking to adopt cloud for some critical workloads and one important aspect that you both mentioned that you're looking for cloud vendors and partners who would like to have skin in the game they would like to be part of your cloud journey that's very important you're also looking for challenges like your team's training processes and of course monitoring and management tools where definitely there should be or possibility to add value from cloud vendors is there so i think uh with that note i would like to really thank both of you for sharing the pulse of wisdom from the industry and uh which am very much appreciated about your time for today's panel discussion and great to have both of you in this panel i would like like to just capture one what we call it as wefee so just give a good smile and we will capture it one more okay thank you thank you