In this interview, Misnik explains the benefits of cloud-first and what role AWS is playing in the bank’s journey to the cloud.
Answers have been edited and condensed.
What are the benefits you hope to achieve from cloud-first?
“For us, cloud is an avenue to drive security, innovation and agility while managing IT costs. Not just the costs of running our systems, but the costs of building new solutions, the costs of maintaining, refreshing, evergreening and monitoring—all the bits and pieces we need to support the business. Second is agility and pace. We don’t want to work with long infrastructure procurement provisioning cycles. We want to work with on-demand infrastructure for both non-production and production workloads—for both old and new systems. We want more agility and faster innovation. Finally, we want to get away from managing infrastructure and avoid any undifferentiated heavy lifting; it’s not something that adds value to our customers. We prefer to focus our efforts on building leading financial services capabilities rather than running data centers.”
What exciting innovations will come about because of cloud-first?
“Cloud provides us the ability to try new things and innovate quickly. We have a fintech lab, where we deal with a lot of startups that we want to bring in. The UAE’s national agenda is built around data, innovation and technology. And as the leading bank in the country, we are very proud to participate and drive this agenda. We’re working with Abu Dhabi Global Markets, an innovation hub within Abu Dhabi, to create a next-generation fintech ecosystem for the country.”
How does AWS Outposts fit into your overall cloud strategy?
AWS Outposts is a service that brings the AWS cloud to new places. It does this by extending AWS infrastructure, tools, APIs and services to customers’ data centers, colocation facilities or on-premises facilities that are outside AWS regions. Customers can preconfigure Outposts, which are standard server racks, with Intel-powered Nitro-based Amazon EC2 virtual machine instances and storage capabilities.
“Cloud-first has been one of the fundamental blocks of our technology strategy since the first quarter of this year. We have an almost-100% on-premises environment, so we’re starting from scratch. We have a number of data centers we own and run in the UAE and internationally, but we’re not going to grow our data center footprint. We want to work with global and national cloud providers, including AWS, to modernize our infrastructure and assets, and harness all the innovation we can get from that estate. Since there is no local AWS region in the UAE, we’re using Outposts for both dev/test and production workloads. Our first production workload—a mobile app for our corporate customers—is now live on AWS Outposts. We believe it’s the first in the Middle East and North Africa. We are targeting to have 30% of our eligible workloads moved to the cloud in the next two years. So we’re at the beginning of the journey, but we have big ambitions.
From a security perspective, especially in financial services, maintaining customer trust and having best-in-class security is always a top priority. We want to be able to create, develop and test environments in the cloud because it’s secure.”
The AWS Outposts deployment at the bank connects to the AWS Region in Bahrain (me-south-1) for control plane operations.
What specific aspects of the AWS cloud do you like having access to most?
“We wanted to have something that runs in our own data center but feels, smells and tastes like native cloud services. It’s important that we have as much symmetry as possible between native public cloud services and services that run on premises. So Outposts is an important piece of innovation from AWS that allows us to do exactly that. Our compute, storage and database capabilities with Outposts—EC2, EKS, S3, RDS—are mostly the same capabilities we’re getting in any AWS Region. Our storage capability on Outposts works in the same way that we interact with any other AWS service in a public region. We don’t need to write our software twice. We also don’t need to migrate and write a bunch of scaffolding and automation to move things between public regions and Outposts in our data center.”
Explain how the symmetry you mentioned earlier helps your staff.
“I don’t have to retrain my developers or operational staff to do things differently. The services run on premises will be the same services on the cloud. That means we don’t have to do extra testing, verification or tuning.
Furthermore, Outposts helps us recruit IT talent. We’re trying to in-source a lot of skills, and there’s a ‘coolness factor’ for our application, networking and data center engineers. They are excited to work on this innovative technology.”
To what extent does the rest of the
C-suite know what you're doing and how do they shape your mindset and decision-making?
“Everything we do is driven by business requirements and business demands. We don’t do IT for the sake of IT, and we don’t do migration for the sake of migration. We do quite a lot of discussions and awareness sessions for our executives and senior management on technology. We bring in people from Silicon Valley and different fintechs to get an outside perspective. We actually brought pictures and specifications of Outposts into an executive committee meeting and compared them to traditional on-premises hardware configurations. We talked about their density of resources and what’s packed inside compared to what we have in our normal racks. It was a visual way to show and articulate how different they were from traditional data center systems, and why cloud is fundamentally a differentiator compared to what we have in our own data center.”
