CIO Straight Talk - Issue 11 - 10

towards projects with the best possible rate of
return," he says. "The cloud allows us to move
with the speed and agility necessary to achieve
this, which otherwise would be very difficult."

"MANY OF THE FUNDAMENTAL
TECHNOLOGIES BEHIND TODAY'S
MACHINE-LEARNING PLATFORMS
HAVE BEEN AVAILABLE FOR YEARS
- OR EVEN DECADES. HOWEVER,
HARNESSING SUFFICIENT COMPUTE
POWER WASN'T PRACTICAL FOR
THE MAJORITY OF USE-CASES."
STEVE WILSON
VICE PRESIDENT OF CLOUD AND IOT
CITRIX SYSTEMS

Whether his team is building IoT, big dataapplications, visual processing, or predictive
analytics, the cloud is speeding up delivery and
adoption. "It gives us greater access to nextgeneration tools than if we would have had to
stand up and integrate all of those things up onprem," he says.

designed to win the trust of customers for
exceptional service. This will demand ongoing
technology-enabled innovation, much of
which is "not possible to do on premises," says
Misnik, the CIO. "Cloud is the foundation for our
transformation and the accelerator of it."
NAB streams all core systems' data into a cloud
native environment. That AWS-backed elastic
data lake serves as the foundation for hundreds
of machine learning and analytics use cases the
bank will explore. One early machine learning
project is QuickBiz, an unsecured lending
platform for small business that leverage AI to
offer straight-through processing of loans. The
cloud is also key is helping NAB comply with
looming Open Banking regulations mandating
that Australia's major banks give customers open
access to and control over their own data. "Cloud
allows us to move much faster
and scale those APIs to open up that data,"
Misnik says.
NAB is also collaborating with Microsoft to
design card-less facial recognition ATMs using
cloud and AI technology. And that's just the
beginning of the cloud-driven possibilities, says
Misnik. "We want to innovate much more."

Operating in the cloud is giving CNX access to
technology that it might have taken longer to get
in the pre-cloud era, according to Carter. "We
are shaving a lot of time off from first thinking
about a project to getting it done," he says. "And
certainly, there's a lot less waste in terms of cost
and effort, because we can just pull down and
access various products and solutions online that
we can incorporate into whatever we're trying to
do. That allows us to focus more of our time on
the business impact of our solutions, rather than
the technology. It essentially democratizes the
adoption of next-gen tools."

Park Place Technologies is also in the process
of moving most of its service to the cloud.
"We intend to spend more of our resources on
cloud-native development to take advantage
of PaaS and serverless opportunities," says
Cantor, the CIO. "That will further lower our
management burden, increase our flexibility, and
introduce new technology capabilities." There
are many capabilities - for example, Vision API,
TensorFlow, Blockchain - that are too expensive
to trial in an on-premise version or in a software
acquisition mode, according to Cantor.

NAB, the Australian bank, has embarked on a
three-year, $4.5 billion transformation project

"These are capabilities we would like to
potentially utilize, and the cloud environment

CIO Straight Talk - Issue 11

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CIO Straight Talk - Issue 11