Cloud computing is no longer an option for business. Customers demand instant access to services, and mobile applications are the interface for everything, from ordering a pizza to getting a mortgage. Making the move to cloud may be required in modern business, but making the journey safely is key for security-conscious organizations, such as banks and financial institutions.

“I think that eventually we will have a multicloud strategy, but … we don’t want to be in the news for a data breach,” said Suzan Pickett (pictured, left), vice president and director of converged infrastructure at U.S. Bank National Association. 

Pickett and Jon Siegal (pictured, right), vice president of product marketing, converged platforms and solutions, at Dell Technologies Inc., spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technology World event in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed Dell’s new infrastructure products and how the company helped U.S. Bank on its cloud journey (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

First on-premises, then into multicloud

U.S. Bank is the fifth-largest bank in the United States, with almost $500 billion in assets. Keeping security priority number one, Pickett and her team started with a solid on-premises basis of infrastructure as a service.

“Then we [will] extend that into the cloud as much as we can, and maybe there will be some cloud-native apps down the road that go 100% in the public cloud,” she stated.

Dell is an important partner on U.S. Bank’s journey. “It’s always been that strong partnership, that enablement, and that continuous feedback loop,” Pickett said. “We’ve always found that Dell Technologies is there to support us.”

Product announcements at Dell Technology World underscore how the Dell ecosystem is focusing on its customer’s move into hybrid cloud.

“[Hyperconverged infrastructure] VxRail, in particular, was featured as the simple and fast foundation for the Dell cloud both as the on-prem manage version, as well as the data center as a service,” Siegal said.

Another announcement was the extension of the Dell-Cisco Systems Inc. collaboration on converged infrastructure system VxBlock. “VxBlock was the pioneer in the converged infrastructure space,” Spiegel explained. “With all the recent integrations we’ve done with VMware, VxBlock, as well as HCI, it’s really built to be an on-prem foundation for the cloud.”

Using Dell EMC VxFlex integrated systems and VMware’s hybrid cloud management platform vRealize Suite, the U.S. Bank infrastructure team cut the time to provision a virtual machine from three months to three days. “We anticipate, with a lot of our sprints and iterations, that we’re going to be getting that down to less than a day within the next quarter,” Pickett added.

As well as increasing speed, automation with Kubernetes on VxFlex cut costs by eliminating the need for building physical servers, Pickett told theCUBE. “That in and of itself was a huge win, but the fact that we can repurpose and releverage that automation, those workflows, the orchestration models, means that we can continue this conversation with the next business line and the next business line and keep telling that story,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Tech World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE