Transforming the future – Microsoft helping financial services embrace cloud as a business differentiator

“We are seeing more financial services customers moving their employees away from aging productivity technologies to Microsoft Online Services. Sixteen of the top 20 global banks are customers of Microsoft Online Services.”
-Binda Hallauer

What is Microsoft's momentum and investment in the cloud?

Bindia Hallauer. From Hotmail to Windows Update and Xbox Live, Microsoft has almost 15 years' experience in cloud computing, hosting some of the world's most widely used cloud services. Microsoft's cloud services represent an evolution of our work in web and computing standards. Microsoft sites, including MSN.com and Windows Live Services attract more than 600 million unique users worldwide each month across 46 markets in 21 languages, and 50 percent of Fortune 50 companies are customers of Microsoft cloud services.

Microsoft has a portfolio of cloud assets. Software as a Service: Microsoft Online Services provides all the benefits of the most recent versions of productivity and collaboration products delivered as a service without costly updates. Microsoft Online Services include Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft Live Meeting, Microsoft Office Communications Online, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Financial enterprise customers get secure access to e-mail, instant messaging, shared workspaces,  and their employees can work from anywhere with an Internet connection. Since no hardware/installation is involved or day-to-day management requirements, these IT departments can refocus resources on the daily demands of their business.  Microsoft runs these services on a global network of world-class datacentres which are protected by multiple layers of security, operational best practices, and policies. Currently we have nearly 40 million customers of Microsoft Online Services.

Platform as a Service: Microsoft's Windows Azure and SQL Azure platform provides app development, database, and storage platform in the cloud. With the Windows Azure platform, financial services customers and partners bring innovation to market faster with greater choice in developing new types of scale-out, highly available, cloud applications using familiar tools, leveraging on-premises investments, and without managing infrastructure. Financial Customers can also connect apps and services across the cloud or with their on-premises apps with Windows Azure App Fabric. Whether the apps are developed in .NET, Java, etc you deliver apps to your private cloud or public cloud with Windows Azure platform. This offers faster ramp-up curve benefits to our financial customers who can on-board legacy/existing applications or choose to opt for hybrid scenarios.

Windows Azure was released only a few months ago and already has more than 10,000 customers and 4000 applications profiled as 'platform ready'.

Infrastructure as a Service: Customers can build a private cloud infrastructure today on Windows Server Hyper V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager for virtualizing and managing compute capacity on demand in their datacenters. Windows Azure is Microsoft's public cloud services operating system that serves as the service hosting and service management environment in the cloud. Windows Azure provides on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the Internet through Microsoft datacenters. With Azure, financial businesses pay only for what is used, scale up when capacity is needed, and let Microsoft handle the maintenance.

Microsoft is enabling financial institutions to leverage cloud technologies on their own terms.  

Is there an uptake for Microsoft cloud offerings from financial institutions?

BH. Microsoft has taken countless financial services customers through many computing transitions and evolutions. Microsoft will continue to help them evolve with the cloud.   Financial institutions are leveraging Microsoft cloud offerings by moving financial workloads to the cloud to reduce costs, enhancing existing investments with cloud based improvements, and building transformative financial applications that create new business opportunities.

As an example, the world's fifth largest insurance group's CIO set a strategic vision to unify the company under a single brand, worldwide. Global communication and collaboration across the business was a key challenge, which required both a technical environment and cultural change. They implemented Microsoft Office SharePoint Online as their cloud-based collaboration environment. The company got the capacity to communicate with and engage all employees, with an easy way to unify regional initiatives, share best practices, and ensure consistency under the same brand.

We are seeing more financial services customers moving their employees away from aging productivity technologies to Microsoft Online Services. Sixteen of the top 20 global banks are customers of Microsoft Online Services.

I talked about productivity and collaboration scenarios based on cloud. Let me talk about high computing workloads in financial services leveraging cloud. RiskMetrics found an innovative way to expand the scale of services for their clients. RiskMetrics developed RiskBurst (a SaaS risk analytics app) based on Windows Azure to provide large amounts of computational power, many thousands of processors, for bursts of intensive Monte Carlo simulation based pricing for complex financial asset types. RiskMetrics was able to use the same development tools and source code to rapidly extend their existing solution to Windows Azure since their existing analytics used our technology. The full case study can be found on our website.

Financial services companies are overwhelmed with regulatory and compliance challenges. Is the cloud a safe place to hold data?

BH. Financial services businesses should be able to choose where and how they manage, deploy or store their data. Microsoft is committed to delivering a secure, reliable computing experience both for public and private cloud.

We know and understand that today's interconnected world is not just about trustworthiness of people but also trustworthy computing solutions. Trusted third-party certification provides a well-established mechanism for demonstrating protection of customer data without giving excessive access to teams of independent auditors that may threaten the integrity of the overall platform. Windows Azure operates in the Microsoft Global Foundation Services (GFS) infrastructure, portions of which are ISO27001-certified. In fact, Microsoft is the first major online service provider to earn ISO/IEC 27001:2005 certification. Independent, IIIrd party validation for Microsoft's cloud infrastructure includes achievement of both SAS 70 Type I and Type II attestations. Windows Azure is in the process of evaluating further industry certifications including PCI DSS.

Microsoft Corporation is a signatory to Safe Harbor and is committed to fulfill all of its obligations under the Safe Harbor Framework. While responsibility for compliance with laws, regulations, and industry requirements remains with Windows Azure customers, Microsoft remains committed to helping customers achieve compliance through the features that I described.

As an industry thought leader, we continue working together with Cloud Security Alliance on defining common assurance metrics (CAM) models for cloud security and understanding security needs from customers and industry experts such as ENISA and FISMA.

Financial Services enterprises face multiple constraints and challenges - greater physical control, geographic proximity, regulatory compliance, and data sovereignty. The question customers have for us is 'when can I run Windows Azure in my own datacenter?' They are asking when can I have all of these benefits but in my environment much more under my control. Microsoft Windows Azure Appliance will be a service that Microsoft delivers to customers and service providers that they can run in hardware that they own or rent within their own datacenter. It will include Windows Azure and SQL Azure. Like Azure, it is designed for phenomenal scale and things like multi-tenancy support and business continuity. Azure Appliance will offer physical control, geographic proximity, regulatory compliance, and data sovereignty for financial customers who want Azure benefits in a private cloud environment. Currently we are working with hardware partners such as HP, Dell and Fujitsu to ensure they have identical hardware that we run in our own datacenter.  

What are Microsoft's cloud differentiators?

BH. We differentiate via...

Flexibility and Control - financial services customers can leverage cloud computing on their own terms. We are the only vendor in the world offering capabilities across customer data centers, partner datacenters and Microsoft's own.

Familiarity and Consistency - financial services customers can leverage what they already have and consistently move data back and forth, being able to span services from datacenter to the cloud in a consistent way.

Experience and Ecosystem - we are the only company investing to have this experience scale and the breadth of partners that work with the platform.

Biography

Bindia Hallauer is the CTO for Worldwide Financial Services Sector at Microsoft Corporation, based in Redmond, Washington, USA. She plays a strategic leadership role in helping financial services customers transform their business with innovative solutions.