DTCC remains focused on advancing technology modernization, and on continued execution of a robust hybrid cloud strategy that ensures production stability and resilience for clients and the broader financial services industry.
DTCC Connection spoke with Rob Gambardella, DTCC Managing Director of Enterprise Product and Platform Engineering, to find out more about the progress of DTCC’s hybrid cloud strategy, infrastructure trends to watch, as well as his team’s priorities for 2023.
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DC: Like many other firms, we have a hybrid cloud approach to building, operating and securing applications. How has your team’s strategy progressed in recent years?
RG: At DTCC, we host applications on both the private and public cloud. Since we’ve been on our cloud journey for over a decade, our primary approach in the public cloud has been focused on two broad use cases. The first is for commodity services, where we leverage the best fit cloud provider to drive efficiency and host corporate applications that support employee collaboration and other shared services. The second use case is for hosting business applications, and we have a number of those in the cloud.
Public cloud is a key element of our platform strategy because we’re client-focused and our goal is to enable optionality in terms of scalability, flexibility and cost for our business partners. This year, we are continuing to work with providers to enhance their services to meet our needs, especially in the resiliency space. Moving forward, we will continue to closely evaluate business cases as we balance hosting applications on both the private and public cloud.
Our investment in private cloud continues and this year we are rolling out our upgraded container platform. This offering is a key first step in our journey and provides an important building block for the future. Looking forward, we intend to invest in Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities for our private cloud and enable the consumption of these offerings through a self-service, automated portal for our engineers and developers. This will enable faster time to market, higher quality, and lower costs.
The container platform is also a key enabler of our hybrid strategy, as it provides greater flexibility and simplified system and application management across both public and private cloud.
DC: As technology continues to evolve, what are your team’s top priorities for this year?
RG: Public cloud enablement is a big priority for us. Resiliency also remains a top focus area; it’s embedded in everything we do. We’re making strategic investments in modernizing DTCC’s network, and we’ll continue those efforts over the next year or two. Other priorities include supporting containerization for application portability across platforms, as well as automation and observability for rapid delivery and greater stability and insights across production applications.
DC: Emerging technologies and capabilities provide an incredibly exciting new landscape for modernization. What capabilities have provided the most benefit to our clients, and what are some of those benefits?
RG: Last year we announcedan expansion of DTCC’s partnership with Snowflake. We’re looking to continue to harness Snowflake’s cloud data warehousing capabilities to enhance our client experience. Across the industry, we know data exchange is a major focus; firms are seeking modern, seamless, efficient and cost-effective ways to share data. We’re working with Snowflake to enable that for DTCC clients, and we look forward to sharing more about our progress.
As we advance our public cloud journey, our partnership with AWS remains front and center. We’re closely aligned with AWS to help demonstrate to our stakeholders that there is robust safety and controls built into our designs, especially as we move forward with our goal of hosting critical business applications in the public cloud.
Another capability that we've matured in recent years is automating our development pipeline, enabling a quicker time to market and codifying controls as we deliver solutions for our clients and the industry. This is another important piece of work as we mature the way we build applications.
DC: What are the top focus areas and trends you see for infrastructure, both now and in the near future?
RG: Across the industry, cybersecurity and resiliency remain top focuses; it’s why DTCC has invested in academia partnerships with NYU Tandon and Duke University. We are committed to preparing the next generation of IT talent and conducting meaningful research with emerging technologies.
I see cloud adoption continuing to accelerate, and that will bring even greater opportunities for firms to enable data exchange and strengthen data management capabilities. My team is laser-focused on executing our platform strategy, enhancing capabilities, and migrating applications to the public cloud when the business case is the right fit.