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Google Anthos Simplifies Synch For Multi-Cloud Implementations

As regulators are moving to requiring multi-cloud configurations, Temenos is working with Google to use Google Anthos to synch its banking software across multiple clouds or a cloud and an on-prem implementation.

Multi-cloud has two big drivers, said Tony Coleman, director of technology at Temenos. “Regulation, and concern over concentration risk. Regulators are nervous that we have four Tier One banks that control the vast majority of the banking landscape in UK. If they all happened to be on a single cloud provider and it went down, that would clearly be bad news. By enabling a multi-cloud capability you solve that part of the concentration risk issue and the regulatory piece,” he explained.

“The second piece is resilience, high availability, and recovery. With a distributed multi-cloud running actively across multiple clouds at the same time, rather than active-passive, you can use in-memory distributed databases running across two clouds at the same time.”

A client in Hong Kong wanted to go single cloud and the regulator was concerned about what would happen with an outage on that cloud. The bank figured it faced a maximum of two hours downtime. The regulator said that was not good enough.

“We worked with them to develop distribution over multi-cloud.”

Anthos is built on open-source technology pioneered by Google, such as Kubernetes, Istio and containers, it helps banks empower their developers, security professionals, platform teams and operations engineers.

“With Anthos and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) you can build your apps in one place and then be able to deploy across multiple clouds..and have that hybrid cloud infrastructure or even a combination of on premise and cloud based functionalities,” said Christin Brown, Global Financial Services Strategy & Solutions Lead.

“For us there’s been an uplift over the past two years on Google’s cloud capability,” said Coleman. “They very much stepped up their game and enabled a lot more of the managed services that we deem table stakes for a cloud platform. Google has enabled more of those platform services to bring them up to parity with AWS and Azure.”

She said Google’s banking team has had many conversations with regulators in the last several weeks, often around cloud and changing work routines as more banking employees work from home. “They are doing their due diligence and they are being more conversational, trying to take the temperature of what is happening and they are interested as well in how they can be helpful in this environment.”

Temenos has two clients live on the Google cloud and a number who are implementing, and it is working with other regional cloud providers that haven’t been announced yet. For regulators or banks which aren’t comfortable with putting all of their work in the cloud, Temenos is seeing cloud-like solutions such as containers, event streams, micro services and banks deploying its software on premise, which gives the banks a road to cloud.

Keybank is working with the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Cisco HyperFlex to choose which applications to migrate, according to Keith Silvestri, the bank’s CTO and Chris McFee, director of DevOps in a Google blog post.

Google Cloud BlogKeyBank chooses Anthos to develop personalized banking solutions for its customers | Google Cloud Blog

“First on our list: applications that change all the time, so that they can benefit from earlier and more frequent testing that containerization brings to the table.”

The bank prizes the flexibility that containers and Kubernetes bring.

“Containers and Kubernetes have also helped us spin infrastructure up and down on demand. That’s significant when you have big spikes in demand, like over major shopping days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. For example, our online banking application averages about 35 logins per second, but that can surge to 100 logins per second at peak periods. Think about that—we can quickly triple our capacity without having to do anything, because our Kubernetes infrastructure automatically spins up capacity and spins it back down again when it’s not needed,” they said.

“We manage the containerized workloads as if they’re all running in GCP, from the single source of truth, our GCP console.”

Coleman at Temenos said that for many banks, containers are a step on their journey to the cloud.

“They get used to the operations around containers and then can see a way to cloud.”

A happy by-product of a multi-cloud strategy comes at contract time, he added.

“If you have two cloud providers you are in a stronger position because you can turn one off and move to the second, while in a traditional hosted solution it is difficult to talk about migration.”

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