AutoCloud Presents at Finovate Spring 2023

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For more information about this presentation: https://finovate.com/videos/finovatespring-2023-autocloud/

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Full Transcript:

Hey everybody my name is Tyson Kunovsky and I'm the CEO of autocloud. In our demo today we're going to show you howour platform both accelerates and de-risks Cloud adoption by helping automate your most critical choices on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

But before I get there I just want to take a second to acknowledge that here at Finovate in 2023, talking to the industry that people say moves the slowest and maybe isn't exactly top of mind when you think about "elite tech"--well, you're actually the reason that security and operations on the cloud have gotten better over the last 10 years. You're the reason that we have things like modern messaging protocols and policy engines built into our open source tools.

There are all these enterprise-level concerns that--have left to the average practitioner--we would never have, and it's only because financial services has gotten involved that we're where we are today, so I just want to celebrate that because people talk typically talk about financial services as these slow-moving dinosaurs, but then you see all these fantastic stories about how you're proving the whole world wrong when they said that you could never run in the cloud.

But the problem with all that work you put in the most unfortunate thing about all that success all that progress the number one thing that undermines your policy, your security, your adoption of these new technologies is configuration mistakes. We're all painfully aware of how putting the wrong configuration in the wrong place was something as simple as an S3 bucket can lead to hundreds of millions of dollars of legal consequences. So to succeed in adopting cloud technology you need to make sure that all the expertise and best practices that you've built up over the last decade get reflected in the choices you make and the tools you use.

Okay so let's hop over to the AutoCloud platform and I'm going to show you our philosophy for how to get to Cloud faster with fewer mistakes by automating your most critical decisions. Before we dive in, pretend for a minute that you're the CIO of a large FI. The three most important things that we've learned from our customers that you probably care about are the success of your overall digital transformation, managing risk and cyber security, and migrating legacy systems.

Let's double click on that last point for a second. Say that you have existing cloud systems, maybe from acquisitions or previous deployments, and that is part of your current migration strategy. You need to now Wrangle these in and somehow turn them into infrastructures code in order to eliminate any security or compliance blind spots for redeploying them with modern best practices. Say this task falls to one of your direct reports, the Head of Enterprise Architecture, well they're in a bit of a tough spot right now because honestly they're not even entirely sure what's running on cloud.

There's no audit log of what exists because in the past people have just gone into the cloud consoles and click-click-clicked up all the servers and databases they needed, which is called "Click-Ops", and before Infrastructure as Code, it's probably how about 75% of cloud resources got created. Well, the good news is that to get all of this complexity wrangled in, the enterprise architecture team can use our platform to shine a spotlight on their cloud environments and see exactly what's managed via Infrastructure as Code. Like we see here, if there are any security or compliance issues according to your company's internal policies, they can see what those are and how to fix them as we see with these remediation steps.

And they can even use AutoCloud's patent-pending "Blast Radius" technology to understand the implications of any security breaches before they ever even occur in order to avoid regulatory fines by shifting security left.

Okay, so say that the team has fixed any issues that they found. They can now filter down and select just the resources they want for any given application and then automatically generate secure, production-ready Infrastructure as Code by clicking the 'Generate Terraform' button like we see here. The team can then either copy and paste the code over to the right places, or, if they're a little bit more sophisticated and have Git Ops and change management systems, they can integrate with those processes for automatic pull requests.

And the best part, after the team has redeployed their applications using Terraform, they now get an audit log of every relevant change to their cloud environment in order to understand if anything has ever drifted from its original, secure state.

Okay, so to bring it back to the CIO, it's all good and well that you now have an "easy button" for migrating legacy systems to best practices. What about all the new core banking systems that you need to bring to market as part of your 2025 cloud strategy? How do you balance accelerating cloud adoption with mitigating risk so you can get to market faster and cheaper while still making the OCC or PRA happy on the compliance side of things?

Well it's no small feat. You have to somehow capture and standardize all the institutional knowledge that your company has accumulated over the last couple of decades into a single place and actually get people to use it. And this hard job is probably going to fall to your Head of Cloud. In order to support you as the CIO they've got the ambitious goal of making cloud self-service by creating an entire marketplace of Terraform Lego blocks that anybody can piece together, like we see here.

While the head of Cloud's team could certainly use AutoCloud like we just saw to automatically generate all these Lego blocks, say they already have everything they need created. In this case, they can simply upload the company's configuration and policy as a series of Blueprints to their Infrastructures as Code Service Catalog.

The Head of Cloud's team gets complete control of how cloud workloads are created and policy is enforced while still making Blueprints flexible enough for anybody to use. So the next time an app dev who doesn't know cloud or Terraform best practices needs to generate an entire CIS-compliant Kubernetes architecture for a new banking system on AWS, they simply come to their Infrastructure as Code Catalog, select the pattern they want, customize it, fill out a couple of form fields, and then under the hood all the knowledge that you have about security and best practices is applied and the production-ready code is automatically generated. It can be copied and pasted over to the right places or integrated to your existing git Ops processes.

After spending years in the trenches leading enterprise migrations for large FIs, our team built these capabilities which have led organizations like Wells Fargo to invest in us and G2 to award us as a High Performer, and really, we see what we're doing here as an evolution of infrastructure as Code. We're making it more mature, just like the work that FIs have contributed to open source and now your needs in this community are making it better as well and really that's what all these features that we've been showing are about, they're in service of your needs.

All right, so I'll end on this question: What would the business impact be if you were able to de-risk your cloud adoption strategy while also  getting to market significantly faster, cheaper, and safer? When you're ready to answer that question come find me to talk. My name is Tyson Kunovsky and I'm the CEO of AutoCloud. Thank you!