Through 20th and 21st November 2019, Google hosted its annual Cloud Next event in London. Institutions from across financial services, retail, healthcare, high-tech, manufacturing and utilities were in attendance.
Key takeaways for quality leaders at financial firms were:
- Anthos launch: bringing the battle for test environment management to Microsoft and AWS’ door.
- Consumable AI: leveraging GCP compute and innovation to accelerate AI-assisted QA enablement.
- GCP adoption: financials are increasingly turning to this platform throughout the SDLC.
- Change enablement: strategic deployment is assisting firms to implement CI/CD and automation.
Anecdotal discussions with managers responsible for Software Reliability Engineering and Platform Engineering at the event indicate that total spend across the Google ecosystem increased on 2018 figures.
But cloud alone, nor DevOps and Agile, is enough. Up to a third of software leaders commented about the need to design pattern-based architectures for effective cloud migration.
“The challenge of moving to the cloud, for us, is two-fold,” stated a QA Manager for a Tier 1 UK Bank. “First, whether to co-locate data with the applications in the cloud and second, how to implement QA pipelines using cloud platforms, with effective quality gates.”
The coming 18 months, it seems, promise explosive competition between the three cloud services providers (CSPs) most commonly referenced in financial services: AWS, Microsoft and GCP.
Software leaders at financial and telecoms firms can download the QA Vector® Research report, sponsored by CAST Software, about grasping the opportunity of cloud migration 2.0.
