Global Head of Cloud at ING

As Global Head of Cloud Jacco Landlust leads the Global Cloud tribe within ING. He set the long-term vision and strategy for the tribe, while also responsible for the performance and achievements of the tribe members.

The ING Private Cloud is part of the strategic pillars of ING (simplify and consolidate), giving exposure to regulatory bodies as well as investors. From this role Landlust drives innovation while empowering his international team that spans over 350 engineers in six countries. Each team builds their own products, which roll up to the private cloud portfolio of ING. This cloud enables engineers in the bank to bring applications fast to market using reliable, secure and finance-industry compliant infrastructure.

Landlust’s motto is everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Following is the conversation we had with Landlust.

What is ING's overall strategy and approach to cloud adoption and utilization?

Standardization and consolidation of infrastructure services drives a shorter time to market, consistent high quality and economy of scale. ING has driving as multi-cloud strategy with the governance and support in place to guide the bank which cloud service to use best for various use-cases. This can be either on-premises or in public. Depending on the use-case.

For private cloud, ING is envisioning:

• Existing workloads: Applications that are not cloud native and therefore not ready to run cost effective on public cloud. Until these systems are replaced by newer versions, they will remain on our private cloud.

• Back-end systems: systems with long life cycles (e.g. core bank, finance and risk systems) are often supported by older types of architectures or have vendor dependencies, making them unsuited for public cloud.

• Risk or Legal limitations: systems and data that we are not allowed or find too sensitive to host in the public cloud

For public cloud, ING is envisioning:

• Front-end systems: In general, fast evolving functionalities (e.g. front end facing apps) based on modern cloud native architectures and, as they are continuously being renewed and upgraded, we can choose to run these functionalities on the public cloud in the future.

• Data analytics: public cloud data analytics and AI services are superior to ING’s capabilities and require sheer amount of compute power and scalability. These will be one of our first use cases in the public cloud.

• Global scalability: making our banking technology platform available in all ING countries globally.

• Specific business (application) workloads: running on a cloud outside of ING and fully delivered by vendors. Typically, they are themselves using cloud technology to host their services.

How has the cloud transformed ING's operations and customer experience? Can you provide specific examples?

Because of the ING engineered integration of private and public cloud features, customers, as well as employees, have a seamless experience when working with ING provided systems. Driving standardization across all of ING’s legal entities in the different countries, allows ING to combine the workforces of the different entities into one true global workforce. Engineers from country A can easily work together with engineers from country B. In today’s world, where talent is one of the most scarce resources in a company, this is a huge benefit. This drives a shorter time to market for new business functionality.

“Driving standardization across all of ING’s legal entities in the different countries, allows ING to combine the workforces of the different entities into one true global workforce.”

What are some of the key benefits and challenges that ING has experienced in its cloud journey?

Keybenefits of standardizing on ING’s cloud offering are:

• Increased productivity

• Shorter time to market

• Consistent high quality

• Lower cost-to-serve

Running multiple infrastructure platforms, at scale, taught us some valuable lessons:

• Platforms are products by treating them as such, many problems can be prevented. For instance: design for scalability from the start.

• Partnerships end, when embarking on a joined journey one must think about how to part from the partners involved.

• Think different be prudent when looking at new functionality and features, in the end technology is a means to an end. Balancing strategically across public and private cloud brings ING flexibility and control in operations, cost and risk.

• Idempotency is an important rule of thegame thus ensuring that platforms and services are as independent as possible.

• Consumers are more creative than you think, thus our platforms need to deliver conformity bots to detect misconfiguration and/or mis usage of platform instances.

• Reporting capabilities that expose data on availability, interfaces & conformity of (instances on) the platform is a must. Including clear descriptions of the output/metrics for the consumers of this data.

• Compliance to regulations is not an afterthoughtcompliance must be engineered into solutions from the start to avoid high impact on implementation planning.

• Nobody wants to be a first mover, driving adoption of new platforms and functionality can only be in close cooperation with the consumers of those platforms and with support from the highest levels in our bank.

• Life Cycle Management on platforms must be thought off from the start and ING should remain current in close corporation with the vendors delivering the services to avoid "dependency hell”. This process should avoid consumer impact as much as possible.

• Knowledge gaps on Cloud require us to make training and certification mandatory to gain access to cloud. For public cloud this drives a subscription management approach via ING Public Cloud Foundation.

How does ING handle the integration of legacy systems with cloud-based solutions? Are there any best practices or lessons learned in this area?

ING’s software has been rearchitected into a micro services environment. Clear, well defined, integration patterns are key to such architecture. Mainframe in the central part of the bank has been decommissioned in 2022. Replacing older technology with much more modern technologies allows for easier integration. Driving a persistent roadmap that drives such modernization is key if a company wants to be successful in a cloud oriented world.

How does ING approach cost optimization and resource management in the cloud?

Applications are provided by engineers that built the applications on top of infrastructure (containers, vm’s, databases, etc) for applications. Maintaining a metadata model to account this information, provides insight into how much cost is associated to build and maintain applications. This insight is key when making decisions on the future of applications, as well as detecting anomalies in usage.

Over the years ING developed software and practices for right-sizing infrastructure, implementing resilient patterns as well as capacity management. These practices and software in combination with a cost/benefit analysis per application drive the application to remain relevant (or to be decommissioned).

ING does not look at multi-cloud as cost saving strategy.