Google Exec: Regulators Insisting on Multi-Cloud for Financial Firms

Google Cloud is seeing demand from the financial sector for software that allows its clients to manage workloads on rival clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure, as regulators are increasingly focused on pushing multi-cloud strategies, says Adrian Poole, head of financial services for UK and Ireland at Google Cloud.

Authorities fear that vendor lock-in would hinder portability of services in the event of operational disruption of a major cloud provider, concerns that have shown up in European and UK guidelines. 

“The regulators are insisting on multi-cloud from a contingency and exit strategy perspective,” Poole says.

In its own outsourcing guidelines, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority says firms need to ensure they can exit outsourcing plans without undue disruption. They must have exit plans and know how they would transition to an alternative service provider and maintain business continuity.

Poole says he expects that the interoperability of cloud platforms is going to become increasingly important to Google Cloud’s clients. 

Google launched an open hybrid and multi-cloud platform, Anthos, in April last year. Anthos allows customers to operate different apps and tools like Kubernetes across on-premise and cloud environments. Since the launch, large banks publicly known to have signed up to the platform include HSBC Australia and KeyBank. 

Last week, Switzerland-based software provider Temenos announced that it would be running on Anthos, making it the first company of its type to do so. Temenos offers software for a range of financial services uses, including digital front office, payments, and fund administration. The company says 41 of the top 50 top global banks rely on its services for processing daily transactions and client interactions of more than 500 million banking customers. 

“For Temenos to recognize not only that they need to be on Google Cloud Platform, as they did last year, but then to say, ‘We want to utilize the Anthos platform as our way of making sure that we are available in every cloud, and in every on-premise environment,’ just speaks to the pull the market is having to Google Cloud,” Poole says. 

Anthos should help Temenos handle the fragmented regulatory environment in which it operates, Poole adds. “One of the things global banks have to deal with is different jurisdictions and different restrictions on where data can go, and whether data can move between those different countries,” he says.

“So Temenos and Google Cloud are giving them a solution that says, build it once and you can deploy it in multiple environments without having to make huge changes.”

Anthos enables clients to increase their speed of deployment, because they can start building on-premise while they await regulatory and compliance approvals, and scale up as soon as they get them, utilizing the cloud, Poole says.

Google Cloud is not the only one of the major providers to launch such a multi-cloud platform. In November, Microsoft launched Azure Arc, a Kubernetes-based platform that can also run on AWS and Google Cloud. AWS says its Outposts service allows its clients to extend AWS infrastructure, services, APIs and tools to any datacenter, co-location space or on-premise facility.

Google built Anthos using Kubernetes and other open-source tools. It is available on Google Cloud Platform with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and also in the datacenter with GKE On-Prem. 

“What we have seen before is this big, disparate gap between the cloud, on-premise and hybrid,” Poole says. “I think what we are going to see is that divide really closing, and that is what Anthos is going to enable. I think we are going to see more clients looking at exploiting that. I think we will also see wider adoption of cloud. I think it is very clear from the conversations we are having with regulators that they expect a wider adoption.”

Regulators are worried that the majority of financial firms utilize the three main cloud providers. Google Cloud made $8.92 billion last year, according its 2019 earnings statements, which it reported this week. AWS earned around $35 billion last year, while Azure’s revenue was around $16.4 billion.