Financial services

Interview:

Collaborating in the cloud

24 May 2010

Microsoft’s Bindia Hallauer talks about how Microsoft is helping organisations move to the cloud.

Following Steve Ballmer’s address to the University of Washington on the theme of cloud computing, Microsoft’s CTO of Worldwide Financial Services, Bindia Hallauer talks to OnWindows about how the company is helping financial services organisations move to the cloud. Karen McCandless reports.

How can financial services organisations benefit from cloud computing?
Nearly every one of our products has been developed or is being developed for the cloud, which means we are all in. We have been delivering cloud services including Office LiveMeeting and Windows Live Hotmail for more than a decade all over the world and round the clock. We are one of the world’s most connected networks on the planet. Microsoft’s cloud approach to computing is about scale and connecting to a variety of devices and endpoints.

The key thing is that the experience has to be seamless. Microsoft’s differentiator in the market is that it is the only company that provides a range of services from the consumer to the enterprise and also a spectrum of tools and platforms right up to the data centre. We have gone to market via partners including Accenture, Avanade and EDS, among others – to provide the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) of applications to organisations of all sizes. Microsoft has 7,000 partners offering BPOS with 20,000 active trials under way. Across BPOS and Azure, Microsoft and our partners are committed to delivering a broad set of enterprise ready products and design services that build on what customers already know.

One example of a company that has successfully leveraged the cloud is Aviva, the fifth largest insurance company in the world. It had a string of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the past few years and was left with a mixture of different cultures, brand loyalties and IT systems. It leveraged the Microsoft cloud specifically SharePoint Services from BPOS to create an intramural social network within the enterprise, a global management solution with collaboration services and a sophisticated intranet content management system. Aviva is a really good example of a company leveraging the cloud to move forward whilst reducing costs and leveraging cloud for social networking via collaboration.

I would also like to talk about a significant but different kind of player in the industry. Risk Metrics provides risk management analysis for banks, investors and asset managers. The company used Windows Azure as a platform to provide on demand computing capacity to meet dynamic scale needs for their risk analytics capabilities. Windows Azure enabled elasticity by providing scalable nodes to meet its computing needs and business growth. This example should give an indication that cloud computing is not just a concept anymore, we actually have a number of financial service customers already adopting it.

he Windows Azure platform comes with the platform components necessary for building enterprise-class applications and services with no upfront commitment of capital or long-term contracts.

Bindia Hallauer, Microsoft How can you convince customers that the cloud is a safe and secure place to hold data, especially in terms of the financial services industry where you have regulatory and compliance challenges?
The first thing we have to look at is the evidence: we have financial services companies running their applications on the cloud. We are committed to delivering a secure, reliable and private computing experience. We know and understand that today’s interconnected world is about the trustworthiness of not just people, but also trustworthy computing solutions and. This requires a broad industry collaboration effort.

We are not just investing in our platform and infrastructure but also playing a very strong industry role. We work together with the Cloud Security Alliance on common assurance metrics models, in tandem with institutions such as the European Network and Information Security Agency, who are industry experts. We also participated in the Information Security Awareness Forum event for the cloud.

As the first major online service provider to earn ISO/IEC 27001:2005 certification, Microsoft has achieved external validation that its approach to managing security risk in a global organisation is both comprehensive and effective. ISO 27001 certification not only helps ensure effective security management practices, but also streamlines compliance with multiple regulations by providing one defensible standard of care. We also support industry standards such as payment card data security standard, PCI DSS and Sarbanes-Oxley.

Independent, third-party validation includes Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure achieving both SAS 70 Type I and Type II attestations Microsoft Global Foundation Services has gone beyond the ISO standard, which includes some 150 security controls and developed 291 security controls to date to account for the unique challenges of the cloud infrastructure and what it takes to mitigate some of the risks involved

How is Microsoft going to help companies leverage their existing investments in infrastructure?
One of the things that CIOs often get asked about is how they can get better return on investment (ROI) on existing IT instead of looking at the next generation IT investment. They are also looking at how they can use a shared pool of resources to get better ROI. Across BPOS and Azure, Microsoft and our partners are committed to delivering a broad set of enterprise ready products and design services that build on what customers already know and have. When you bet on Microsoft’s interoperable cloud platform, you cut costs and get choice – you can choose to run your application on on-premises or in the cloud. On-demand scalability combined with hardware and application server management in Windows Azure allows better utilisation of resources and relieves developers from infrastructure concerns and allows them to focus on building applications. Large pools of commodity hardware are made highly reliable by software through a high degree of automation. The economic advantages of massive scales are passed back to consumers through a low subscription fee. The Windows Azure platform comes with the platform components necessary for building enterprise-class applications and services with no upfront commitment of capital or long-term contracts. This additionally helps businesses save through lower development costs.

Having a very strong partner ecosystem is important to providing value added services. We have a very strong partnership with Avanade and Accenture.

Avanade Online Services (AOS) is a new business focused on helping organisations use software-as-a-service (SaaS) strategically to achieve key business objectives. AOS provides a complete SaaS platform optimised for the delivery of Microsoft-based business applications.

Avanade’s first offering for AOS is focused on Microsoft Dynamics CRM and features maintenance, support and upgrade services as well as the Avanade Productivity Platform. With AOS for customer relationship management (CRM), Microsoft Dynamics CRM can now be delivered as an enterprise-wide SaaS solution, enhanced with Avanade’s Microsoft expertise and industry-specific CRM solutions and assets, such as Wealth Management, Insurance. The other strong partnership we have is with HP.

HP and Microsoft recently announced a multi-year agreement to deliver solutions that will advance cloud computing by seeding application implementations and eliminate complexities of IT management and lower the overall costs for our customers

The key thing is that enterprises know that running on the cloud is a differentiator and so some will jump on the opportunity much earlier. They can leverage the platform we have in the cloud to get to market quicker. Small and medium size software providers previously did not have the capabilities to reach the enterprise customer market quickly. They now have a springboard to make their services available to a broad spectrum of customers via the cloud. We expect to see a good set or catalogue of partner services that will be based on Microsoft cloud.

This is the first part of a two part interview with Microsoft’s CTO of Worldwide Financial Services, Bindia Hallauer. The next part will focus on the advantages of running in the cloud, hardware and new Microsoft product releases.

Add a comment