SEATTLE — Cloud engineers are in high demand as financial institutions seek to digitalize their cores and update their processes, but finding talent comes down to resources and mindset.

Training digital engineers on cloud infrastructures is surprisingly costly and time-consuming, Victor Tung, U.S. chief technology and operations officer and chief information and operations officer for BMO Capital Markets, said Monday during the panel discussion “In the Air: How to Develop for the Cloud in Order to Enable Technology Strategy” at Bank Automation Summit Fall 2022 in Seattle.

“There’s a whole slew of retraining, reskilling and rethinking around the operating model — around how you actually get cloud ready,” Tung said, noting that core technical skills are important, but building a company culture that embraces the cloud is crucial.

Last year, BMO announced it was modernizing its banking platforms with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred strategic cloud provider. The bank’s biggest hurdle during the transition was getting 50,000 employees to collaborate between departments in the cloud, Tung said.

“It’s the mindset shift that allows us to actually accelerate the cloud journey,” he said.