Citizens Bank plans to take its banking operations to the cloud by 2025.  

“We are going to exit all of our data centers that we own today,” Chief Information Officer Michael Ruttledge said Tuesday at Fintech Connect North America in New York. “We started with seven (data centers) and now we are down to five and by 2025, we will be completely, 100% out of all the data centers.”

By 2025, 90% of the bank’s applications will be on Amazon Web Services while 10% of its applications will be on colocation Equinix, Ruttledge explained. Equinix is an internet company that provides data center services for companies.  

More than 85% of organizations “will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025 and will not be able to fully execute on their digital strategies without the use of cloud-native architectures and technologies,” according to a 2021 Gartner report.  

Cloud technology will become pervasive and anything non-cloud “will be considered legacy,” Gartner analyst Milind Govekar said in the report.  

Data security 

The $222 billion Providence, RI-based bank is looking to ensure the safety of customers data as it makes the pivot to cloud operations. 

AWS and Equinix both have a set of controls and responsibilities pertaining to the perimeter of their data centers, the network, and the actual physical storage, Citizens’ Ruttledge said. 

“But above that, I own all those controls when it comes to application security, database security, user access, whether it’s in my own data center or in the cloud, I own that,” he said. “So, we have very clear divisions of responsibilities and accountability.” 

Citizens is prioritizing its technology enhancement initiative for its legacy infrastructure and platform updates this year. In the first quarter, the bank reported $169 million in tech spend, a 13% year-over-year increase.  

“At the end of the day, it’s all about customer experience, so many things we’re doing are from the customer experience perspective,” Ruttledge said. 

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