Ally Financial does not aim to be 100% cloud native — it is instead opting for a multicloud hybrid strategy. 

“We use cloud solutions where they make sense — balancing cloud-native, on-premises and hybrid solutions based on application complexity, performance, and business needs,” Sathish Muthukrishnan, chief information officer at Ally, told Bank Automation News this week. 

The Detroit-based bank has migrated 90% of its enterprise data and 75% of its applications to the cloud, Muthukrishnan said.

The $196 billion bank’s multicloud strategy includes Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and its own private infrastructure, Muthukrishnan said.  

“A multicloud strategy provides us with flexibility, resilience and access to the best tools from each provider, reducing dependency on any single vendor,” Muthukrishnan said. “By balancing public clouds and our own private cloud, we can dynamically migrate workloads to preserve optionality and enable resiliency strategies that wouldn’t be possible in a single cloud environment.” 

Why hybrid?

While most FIs are migrating to the cloud, many don’t want to move all of their operations, Agustin Rubini, director and analyst at think tank Gartner, previously told BAN. 

According to a Nov. 13 blog post by cloud service provider OpenMetal, private cloud costs are significantly lower than public clouds and can cost up to 50% less in many instances. 

“The preference for private over public clouds among financial institutions primarily stems from the heightened control over sensitive data and operations, despite the higher costs associated with maintaining a dedicated private cloud,” Rubini said. 

Citizens Bank aims to move all of its operations to the cloud by the end of 2025 and will have moved 70% of its applications by the end of 2024, Michael Ruttledge, chief information officer at $212 billion bank, previously told BAN. 

Amsterdam-based $976 billion ING Bank, on the other hand, wants a hybrid cloud strategy in which the bank keeps some data on premises for security reasons, Marco Eijsackers, head of the CIO office at ING, previously told BAN. 

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