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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

> Once the risks are reviewed in open and honest ways, we find that virtually all of our clients would prefer to keep our solution on-prem.

I hope this kind of risk assessment becomes more common. I'm used to people not caring until things blow up on their faces.

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Well, I guess you are speaking about companies who don't know what they do. But this article speaks about banks, who have hundreds of servers, ability to recover anything, full-time employed ops teams, monitoring & automation in place for 20 years already. Moving to cloud provides very little advantage (definitely not financially) to such companies. They are not SaaS who might need to double their infrastructure overnight. Lots of advantages provided by cloud has been in place years before clouds because of VMWare. Another thing is existing bank apps are often monoliths (when you are happy, in Java with Spring, C# .NET, when not, in Visual Basic, Cobol, PowerBuilder, SAP) or huge interconnected services, huge databases with thousands of stored procedures, SOAP APIs in place. This is not a place where you would leverage ElasticBeanstalk or AWS Lambda.

Its not as simple as that. Just because its the case of "we have lots of old stuff" doesn't mean you need to ignore the new stuff. Building solutions with traditional data centers and staff, even if you have a lot of it, is often a lot slower. You can spin up entire fleets of servers (or even use services such as AWS Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB so you never use servers) and get a solution out in much less the time. Its not just about responding to load but also to be fast enough to get new stuff out there. Traditional financial services organisations are notoriously slow to adapt to changes in the market. Using cloud resources alongside the legacy infrastructure is one way to try and remain competitive.

> Traditional financial services organisations are notoriously slow to adapt to changes in the market. Using cloud resources alongside the legacy infrastructure is one way to try and remain competitive.

Or, you could have a single executive action revamp IT resource acquisition policies. Simply mandate that internalized self-service resource provisioning capabilities be developed.

It is not rocket science to put a web dashboard around vmware or some other virtualization solution. Most of them already sell something like this as part of their feature set.

You could set something like this up in a week if you had enough buy-in. There are no excuses if you want to win at this kind of game. The bad guys are way more patient in aggregate.

A 2nd perspective - One of our customers has a "traditional" process for setting up new IT workloads, and we were still able to get 3 servers provisioned within 8 hours along with 3 new publicly-routable IPv4 addresses and matching DNS+TLS certs. Anything less than this in 2021 for any organization is indicative of sheer incompetence IMO. We do have some customers that are really slow, but they are also really small. I don't think any F500 is taking weeks to provision SQL Server anymore.

Not to mention that that same infrastructure you say is in abundance is usually pretty heavily utilised already so there isn't just spare capacity lying around. Procuring new hardware can take months and if there is no rack space you are looking at more months to get that deployed.

The people that need to plan, coordinate and install all of this are also pretty heavily overworked at the moment because, believe it or not, there is a very large shortage of skilled sys admins in the world.

Using the cloud doesn't solve those problems, but it does help reduce their impact.

> Moving to cloud provides very little advantage (definitely not financially) to such companies.

As someone who has worked as a software developer for big NY banks for the past 25 years, that's simply not true.

The answer is, it's complicated. JPMorganChase for instance has a $12 billion annual IT spend. They do a LOT of different things. Admittedly certain things are best left on prem for regulatory audit points (more with respect to resilience/business continuity rather than security.) But a substantial portion of it could be moved to the cloud at some cost savings.

Additionally the brittleness of the service and database infrastructure is a pathology of the on-prem environment rather than an argument for it. Cohorts of SA's and DBA's are wasting their time doing work which in a modern environment would be scripted and more flexible.

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