As promised in the previous blog entry “Selecting the right compliance frameworks to evaluate cloud services”, this is the first post in a series offering a case study and 5-step checklist for cloud service evaluation. We’ll also explore the key Oracle resources which supported the cloud service evaluation and selection process. 

Introduction

After years of supporting customer inquiries and requests, I’ve noted common concerns and challenges across organizations around the world. This case study is derived from my experience and reflects many lessons learned engaging with customers worldwide. The case study describes a fictional company called 123 Bank Corp, a composite representation of customers in industries such as financial services, health care, and other highly-regulated sectors. You’ll likely recognize similarities with your own organization, regardless of your industry and location.

Case Study: 123 Bank Corp

123 Bank Corp is a global financial services company operating in the United States, European Union, United Kingdom and India. 123 Bank is subject to a range of regulations and legal requirements due to its industry and global footprint. The Board of Directors, CEO and senior executives mandate that robust information security and privacy controls be used to protect the data the bank handles for enterprise operations and when providing their wide range of financial services.  

123 Bank Corp’s Objectives for Cloud

The bank made a strategic decision to favor cloud services for all new and replacement IT systems. Their hopes were to gain competitive advantages by accelerating the pace of innovation for their financial services and to streamline internal processes while addressing regulatory challenges. For example, 123 Bank Corp planned to build a multilingual chatbot using artificial intelligence (AI) for their mobile app and website, as well as introducing micro-lending and micro-donation platforms. Another significant reason for its cloud adoption is that the bank faced significant capital expenditure as a large portion of their current hardware and information technology (IT) infrastructure was approaching end of life. Their chosen cloud solutions needed to:

  • Improve efficiency of global operations in both IT and business teams
  • Meet speed/performance targets in multiple countries
  • Maximize automation to reduce operational costs and opportunities for human error
  • Be resilient, providing the necessary “uptime”/availability
  • Have expert 24x7x365 customer support
  • Be certified to key security and privacy compliance frameworks
  • Launch on their tight schedule

 

Cloud Services Needed

Based on 123 Bank Corp’s executive-driven initiatives, the business and IT teams collectively determined that they initially needed these types of cloud services:

  1. Software as a Service (SaaS) applications which integrate financials and personnel management
  2. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS):
    1. Compute environments for hosting customer banking portals
    2. Artificial Intelligence tools supporting large language models (LLMs) for chatbots
    3. Database services to support customer banking portal and other systems
    4. Integration services to connect cloud services to legacy on-premises systems and other cloud services

 

Cloud Evaluation Checklist

123 Bank Corp chose to use a 5-step checklist to guide its selection of cloud services:

  1. Identify essential security, privacy, and compliance requirements for these specific solutions
  2. Define features and functional requirements, including resilience
  3. Generate “short list” of suppliers offering relevant cloud solutions 
  4. Research “short list” of cloud provider companies: financials, global cloud data centers, support
  5. Evaluate cloud services against detailed requirements for each cloud service:
  • Compliance, security, privacy, and data center locations
  • Feature and functional requirements
  • Resilience and business continuity across data centers
  • Deployment timelines to fit their tight schedule
  • Cost savings target

 

Upcoming posts of this series will dive deeply into each step and reference useful Oracle resources. For readers in the midst of migrating from on-premises systems, it may be useful to learn more about the differences in responsibility between on-premises system and various types of cloud services.

 

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This blog entry is part of a 4-blog series:

  1. How to Evaluate Cloud Providers: Checklist and Case Study
  2. How to Evaluate Cloud Providers: Checklist Steps 1 and 2
  3. How to Evaluate Cloud Providers: Checklist Steps 3 and 4
  4. How to Evaluate Cloud Providers: Checklist Step 5