J.P. Morgan Creates Executive Role to Lead Cloud Services
August 24 2016 - 12:40PM
Dow Jones News
By Emily Glazer
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. is reaching further into the cloud,
using the technology to cut costs and boost efficiencies.
The largest U.S. bank by assets named an executive who is tasked
with running the bank's cloud services, creating a position to
oversee the technology, according to a Wednesday internal bank memo
reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Harish Grama joins the bank next week as chief information
officer for cloud services. He previously worked at IBM, where he
spent the last 20 years in different technology software
development roles, including most recently head of software
development for IBM's cloud unit, according to the memo.
"The successful adoption of cloud technology is essential,"
wrote J.P. Morgan Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy. Mr. Deasy
added that the bank's "evolving hybrid cloud model" will help its
technologists grow innovation, standardization and productivity in
a secure and stable environment, plus have more efficiencies
through shared platforms."
And it could help cut costs in a lower-for-longer interest rate
environment, potentially saving hundreds of millions of dollars if
it moves toward the cloud, people familiar with the matter have
said.
In February, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon.com
Inc.'s cloud computing service pitched its service to big banks
including J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup
Inc.
J.P. Morgan has been exploring some uses of the public cloud to
trim expenses and for flexibility in storage space, the bank's
chief operating officer, Matt Zames, said at the time. For example,
banks might need extra computing power when credit-card use surges
on Black Friday that they can do without for the rest of the
year.
J.P. Morgan began evaluating the public cloud opportunities in
2015 with an initial pilot plan to understand the potential for
further boosting developer efficiency and lowering technology cost
but is hypersensitive to security challenges, Mr. Zames said.
The bank found some initial possible use cases: infrequently
accessed long-term storage and so-called burst workloads, such as
running big algorithms at certain times when the bank would need to
use more storage space.
Before fully moving forward, J.P. Morgan has a list of "key
controls" to be addressed, including controls on access,
encryption, and legal and compliance issues, Mr. Zames said at the
time.
Mr. Zames added that the bank uses an internal private cloud to
offer similar benefits of the public cloud, namely elasticity,
speed of provisioning and lower cost.
J.P. Morgan has talked to Alphabet Inc.'s Google in addition to
Amazon Web Services unit, people familiar with the matter said in
February. Those discussions have progressed, a person close to the
situation said.
The cloud opportunities also came up during J.P. Morgan's annual
investor presentation in late February, where some executives
mentioned "leveraging the cloud" for "higher-performance
computing."
In an April interview, Mr. Deasy said the bank could use
technologies like the cloud and blockchain to cut costs, redundancy
and time.
"I remember cloud seven or eight years ago being hyped," he
said. "It's just now you're starting to hear about it being
real."
Write to Emily Glazer at emily.glazer@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 24, 2016 12:25 ET (16:25 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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