If many of today’s banks still don’t trust the cloud, how come the financial industry’s regulator does?

An Accenture PLC report released late last year found that 43% of leading global banks have no cloud strategy and 63% lack a roadmap to even measure progress to the cloud. Yet the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc., a not-for-profit organization that is the largest single independent regulatory body for brokerages in the U.S., has more than 90% of its data and applications running in the public cloud, according to its chief information officer.

“I can’t imagine doing what we’re doing now in a private data center,” said Steve Randich (pictured), executive vice president and CIO at FINRA. “There’s no scale; it’s not as secure.”

Randich spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Corey Quinn during the AWS Summit in New York City. They discussed the data management challenge FINRA faced and how the public cloud provided both the structure and security it needed (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Half a trillion validations per day

What FINRA is doing is leveraging data on a massive scale using Amazon Web Services Inc. In a presentation on Thursday at the AWS event, Randich described an operation that manages 500,000 compute nodes with 7 terabytes of new data daily and half a trillion validation checks per day.

When Randich joined the regulatory firm in 2013, he quickly realized that previously installed data warehouse appliances would not keep pace with the volume of information he needed to manage.

“We had a major big-data challenge on our hands,” Randich said. “Public cloud computing is all about horizontal scale at commodity prices, two things that those data warehouse appliances didn’t have. They were vertical and proprietary and expensive.”

In a risk-averse world like financial services, security is paramount. How did Randich manage to convince the FINRA board that the public cloud would be secure? It starts with doing it right, according to the CIO.

“Sloppy migration to the cloud could make you less secure,” Randich said. “There are principles that need to be followed as part of this. I made the point, using logic and reasoning, that going to the cloud and doing it right is at least as secure from a physical standpoint as what we were previously doing.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit NYC. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS Summit NYC. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE