Capital One’s leader of the banking giant’s tech strategy George Brady declared that “We are completely all-in on the public-cloud, and we’ll exit the last of our data centers next year.” Saving hasn’t been the main reason for this decision; however, the company expects to see a substantial reduction in operating costs once the last three data centers.
From private to public-cloud
The eighth data center has opened when Brady joined the company in 2014. Brady named Capital One’s data center as multimegawatt sites in various states in both the Midwest and the East Coast.
After Brandy joined the company, its strategy turned to the public-cloud from a struggling private-cloud initiative. According to Brandy, for embracing public-cloud, there are now about 10,000 workings for the company.
To move all their computing workloads to the cloud, Capital One’s primary provider is Amazon Web Services. He talked about AWS, saying,
“Today, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have the infrastructure scale to match AWS’s, but when the bank’s cloud strategy was starting to take shape, Amazon had the only cloud platform with the geographic reach and the level of technical maturity that met Capital One’s needs.”
With this declaration, we see Capital One still trusts AWS, although data of Capital One customers in the US and 6 million in Canada has been stolen by former AWS employee Paige Thompson earlier this year. FBI arrested and accused him of hacking Capital One’s and 30 other organizations’ cloud accounts.