ANZ starts building out central 'enterprise cloud portfolio'

ANZ has provided more detail around how it is driving more widespread use of secure cloud platforms at the bank.

It yesterday provided the first public details of what it is calling its ‘enterprise cloud portfolio’ - a nascent centralised capability responsible for cloud platform design and operations.

Together with the establishment of the ‘cloud business office’ - which the bank revealed last month as a new internal engine assisting with app migrations to cloud and compliance, ANZ is hoping to drive broader cloud adoption, instead of limiting cloud to use to specific “tactical projects”.

Enterprise cloud portfolio owner Pierre Semaan said in a LinkedIn post that the challenge of establishing the capability “is not insignificant.”

“The desire is to create a team with ultimate responsibility to enable cloud at the bank, including the non-technical elements of education, skills sets, governance, risk, enablement and of course ultimately the adoption and use of our cloud platform consistently,” Semaan wrote.

“We have combined the teams working our public cloud platform and tooling with the automation teams and security teams to create a true DevSecOps approach to cloud platform design and operations. 

“We have also created a cloud business office to help platform users with governance, risk and on-boarding; but just as importantly we are partnering with our major initiatives on their use of cloud and helping them leverage the platform and evolve it…”

Semaan said the portfolio teams held their “first program increment planning session recently and it was a pleasure to see how much more value you can get out of a system when you organise around true value streams, as opposed to functional silos.”

Semaan’s commentary appeared to coincide with the opening of the first phase of hiring for the enterprise cloud portfolio.

ANZ indicated that the majority of roles at present were only open to internal candidates, although the bank did list a pair of external roles around site reliability engineering (SRE).

The advertisements provide more details of how the bank is treating the new portfolio.

“The cloud platform area is responsible for building and running ANZ's secure cloud platforms based on Google Cloud and AWS, enabling the bank to make use of everything the cloud has to offer - containers and Kubernetes, serverless, big data and machine learning, and more,” the advertisements say.

“We are also responsible for tooling, methodology and automation to enable rapid cloud adoption, as well as implementing and championing SRE principles to ensure that the cloud delivers the expected performance, reliability and availability to support our business.”

The bank indicated a second phase of recruitment is likely to open up in late November, as it sought “risk, governance, APRA [Australian Prudential Regulation Authority], controls, learning, data analysis and management, FinOps, solution design or customer service skills”. 

ANZ has provided increased visibility in recent months around its cloud expansion.

It helped bring Kubernetes expert Kelsey Hightower to Australia recently, in part to examine the bank's cloud engineering practices and benchmark against international adopters.