Wells Fargo intends to move all of its data and compute resources to the public cloud within a decade, and it tapped Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to manage the bulk of that effort. 

“The North Star here is within a decade that we will be 100% on public cloud,” Christopher Marsh-Bourdon, head of hybrid environments at Wells Fargo, told SDxCentral.

“We want to modernize our technology in the firm so that we can innovate faster, so that we can be more resilient as an organization, and ultimately to take us to a digital-first bank,” he said.

The financial institution also wants to improve the work experience for its nearly 260,000 employees by providing them with contemporary toolsets and practices.

Wells Fargo, the third largest bank in the U.S., determined out of the gate that a single cloud provider wouldn’t achieve its goals or provide the proper safeguards for risk. 

Once it established a wish list of features and capabilities it wanted from public cloud providers, Wells Fargo approached vendors throughout the space to best match those desired outcomes with currently available tools from each provider, Marsh-Bourdon explained.

Marsh-Bourdon declined to quantify the overall split between Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud on a percentage basis. He also didn’t comment on what specifically put Amazon Web Services (AWS) out of the running for its public cloud contracts. 

“Ultimately, these two companies were very much ahead of the pack in terms of meeting that criteria,” he said. “We have a large body of applications within the organization, they’re using many different technologies, and they [Microsoft and Google] were able to enable us to move those technologies to the cloud.”

The bank isn’t looking to do a lift-and-shift of current workloads, Marsh-Bourdon added. “We believe that to get the benefits of the cloud, one has to reengineer for the cloud.”

This strategy, he explained, also allows Wells Fargo to gain the benefits of scalability and elasticity. “Moving workloads, just as they stand, do not give you many of the benefits of public cloud, so we wanted to fully leverage the public cloud from that perspective.”

Wells Fargo plans to put artificial intelligence, machine learning, and highly-complex applications on Google Cloud. Microsoft Azure, the bank’s primary public cloud provider, will host what Marsh-Bourdon described as commodity, typical three-tier applications.

There will also be a mix and crossover between the primary and secondary public clouds, and that will depend largely on the customer base, geographic location, and the types of data workloads, he said. “By and large, we have our rules and we’ll have our exceptions too.”

During the review process, Wells Fargo did a deep dive on security and evaluated all potential cloud providers on those terms, he said. Microsoft and Google both implement a shared-responsibility model, but Marsh-Bourdon noted that security doesn’t stop at the cloud layer. “It’s something that we build in from the get-go.”

Wells Fargo also intends to turn down all of its on-premises, company owned data centers during the next decade. There will be a mix of private cloud that’s third-party owned during that transition, but the goal is to be operating entirely in the public cloud by 2031.

“There’s no point in us investing and purchasing data centers ourselves and building them out. We’re going to leverage third parties to do that on our behalf and lease the space from them. It just makes more sense, and it means that we can focus on modernizing our entire application portfolio so that we have consistency,” Marsh-Bourdon said. “Whether the workload lands in private cloud or public cloud there will be a set criteria by which every application needs to hit to go into these new data centers or the public cloud itself.”

Third-party data center vendors are still being reviewed, he added. 

Wells Fargo plans to strengthen employee skills in public cloud during the next year as it embarks on this journey, Marsh-Bourdon said.  “We have a number of early workloads of varying complexity that are low risk that are going to move to public cloud so that we can ensure, and test that our controls and mechanisms are in place.”

The next phase for Wells Fargo will involve the development of new workloads for public cloud, he said.