In any regulated industry, moving to the cloud is a complex process. Many financial firms are running hybrid data centers and have an abundance of legacy systems they are trying to migrate to the cloud to capitalize on speed and agility. One worldwide financial services holding company, State Street Corp., is making the move to the cloud.

“We probably have about 1,700 applications deployed today within our enterprise and predominantly hosted within our core data centers. We have been a little reluctant to take advantage of the emerging capability and opportunities that the cloud represents. So we’re starting our journey now to entertain IBM’s capabilities,” said Tom Ready (pictured), senior vice president of service delivery at State Street.

During IBM InterConnect 2017, held in Las Vegas, NV, Ready spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, about the challenges the financial industry faces in moving to the cloud. (*Disclosure below.)

The relationship between IBM Corp. and State Street is about 30 years old. The financial institution is responsible for 11 percent of the world’s assets and serves more than 100 markets, according to Ready. In order to help clients mitigate risk, challenges and complex problems, the company is beginning its journey with IBM into more dynamic solutions to develop a hybrid infrastructure to meet the needs of its clients and comply with regulators around the globe.

Pushing hybrid to bring agility

The company is pushing the agile framework and the agile method, according to Ready.  

State Street developed its own Infrastructure as a Service to use with newer and legacy systems. The company has 200 certified teams using agile methodologies across six of the eight platforms. These teams are coding on a variety of platforms, from the mainframe all the way to open systems.

“We struggle using traditional infrastructure, and we are extremely interested in some of the work IBM has going on with regard to how some of these clouds actually comply with regulatory requirements,” Ready said.

State Street operates in  29 countries and has to satisfy 48 different regulators. Ready expressed an interest in IBM’s understanding of what a regulatory compliant cloud looks like and feels that it could be something to take advantage of fairly quickly.

Ready’s teams manage approximately 12 petabytes of data, and the business stakeholders want to access and use the data to their advantage. Yet, there are still privacy and confidentiality concerns that necessitate the data, some of which is old and unstructured, is layered in a secure framework.

As the company’s initiatives with IBM progress, Ready is hoping to use data to bring insights to the business while increasing the agile method used throughout the organization.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. (*Disclosure: SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE is a media partner at InterConnect. Neither IBM nor other conference sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE