>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here in Las Vegas at the Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by folks from MONETA Money Bank. We have Martin Berdych, who is the senior manager IT infrastructure, and Martin Trcka, Cloud Technical Architect Manager at Accenture. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So, we're talking today about MONETA Money Bank's journey to the cloud, but first I want to start with you, Martin, talk a little bit, tell our viewers a little bit about MONETA Money Bank. >> So, MONETA Money Bank, it's the fourth largest bank in Czech Republic, which is not big, because basically the country's small, but the bank is far big. We are serving something around one million customers, and we're providing all the services that you can imagine, so, bank accounts, loans, mortgages, credit cards, whatever you find out, and there's one special thing I'd like to point out, we have a brilliant mobile application, which is consistently getting the awards every year for the best mobile banking app on the market, so this is MONETA. >> So, you're already a pioneer in technology, really on the vanguard, and recently made the decision to move twelve of your, or two dozen of your existing apps, to the public cloud. What was the impetus for that decision? >> I think there's a wider strategy, which is around being digital, being agile, all those buzz words you hear around everywhere, you know. >> No, actually go into that a little bit. >> It's an automation, all the other stuff, I think one of the big ones, as well, was the legacy infrastructure, because the banks got a huge legacy staff, which is causing a lot of issues, if you want to go fast on the market, you want to be quick, you want to respond to your customers, this is slowing us down. So, I think apart from all the other strategy, or at least in my area, the infrastructure part, definitely the big one was the legacy asset we are actually trying to remove by moving to cloud, which is, that's the thing. >> So, they needed a partner to help them move to the public cloud, in this case, AWS, of course, and, so, when Accenture comes into this, first of all, is this a standard client sort of someone who is a company that is already technologically minded, and trying to do this, would you say that this is the kind of organization that gravitates? >> So, MONETA, as a pioneer, in terms of federal public cloud on the checking market, for them, it was a huge step to adopt public cloud, so we are very happy that they ask us for help, the first thing that we did, is we helped them design their IT strategy, what the steps should be in terms of adopting public cloud, actually, we helped them also to define that cloud production would be one of the pillars of their future growth along with other initiatives. So, we helped them with the IT strategy, and then we basically went through that whole journey together with one of the infrastructure teams, one of the security teams, and with our team who helped the client to migrate, eventually, those two dozens workloads into the cloud. >> So, is it a co-creative process, in the sense of are you together, figuring out, the steps on the journey, or is it Accenture in the background, and- >> I think, one of my goal was to make my team part of that as much as possible, so, obviously, Accenture help is appreciated, and they were needed, because the knowledge of public cloud, not only the company, I think, even on the market itself, is very limited, the experience with that is very limited, so Accenture played a strong role in that, but what I make sure from the beginning, or I was trying to make sure from the beginning, is that the team will be part of that from, really, end to end. So they, whatever Accenture was helping, the team was contributing, and they were able to actually do it together, so the knowledge has been increased in the wider theme, so now, we are definitely much more capable than we have been before, and when we started. >> So, how did you help? As you said, figuring out the business challenges, and then actually finding solutions. >> So, it all started with what we call preparation for forging into cloud. This means that we helped the client to assess their risk, because we are speaking about their banks, there's a regulation, which needs to be met, those requirements are regulatory. So, we help the client to assess the risk associated with going to cloud, we help them design their exit strategy when they need to actually exit the cloud, and after we complete those, let's say, preparation tasks, we focus on what we call blueprints. This is basically designing concept of how the target environment will look like in terms of the architecture, in terms of security, in terms of government, so we have, jointly, you know, with Mark Markstein, designed those blueprints, and after that, it was basically ready to take the journey to cloud, actually, itself. >> You mentioned governments, you mentioned security, privacy, GDPR was recently enforced in Europe, did you come up on any challenges with- >> There have been many, obviously, the regulation itself, if it's GDPR, if it's the banking regulation, all the other elements have to be considered, and I think this is a constant task, it's not over, because obviously as we are opening on the market we are learning, and we are showing the other competitors that this is actually possible, and what needs to be done to make it possible, so, obviously, the regulator Czech National Bank had a lot of steps, they gave us a lot of next steps we have to fulfill, so we can actually proceed, and this is an ongoing journey and we have to, kind of, work on this, still work on it, it's not over, there have been a significant risk analysis done, obviously, so do I think it's more than hundred risk has been identified, around the cloud. Now, this has been much reduced, and, obviously, there are still next steps we need to fulfill to get this done. >> So, you have fully migrated to the public cloud? >> Those twenty applications. >> The twenty applications, yes, exactly. What have you seen so far, both from your clients and both from your colleagues? Have you seen changes? >> I think a couple of things. One of things is that the team, not only IT team, but internal people in the bank see that it's actually working, there have been some skepticism in the beginning, obviously, people are looking for reasons why we shouldn't be doing it, because of this and that, I think this is now a bit clearer, and people are kind of getting the feeling that this is actually working. So, this is one of the outcome of the thing. Obviously, the other walls that we've quickly find out and essentially help them that we need to optimize. So, we move it as it is, we lift and shift, and then we find out we're actually wasting resources, therefore we're wasting a lot of money, so we had to start looking, so by moving it, it didn't stop, it's not over, we have to now work on that and we need to find out how do we actually optimize the whole workload and what we can do to actually make it better, apart from the fact we are looking at the other phases of the project and we want to move more, we have to work on the older beta as well, so we need to make sure we get the most from the cloud. >> And what other learnings throughout this process did you come up with, sort of best practices that have emerged, as you said, you are showing your competitors that it is possible, the other top three banks in the Czech Republic, are, sort of, learning from MONETA Money Bank's experience, what would you say are the best practices? >> So, it really depends, you know, from which perspective you look on those lessons learned, from the regulation perspective, the answer is yes, it's possible to edit public cloud, even with, in higher FS Market, however, you need to meet money requirements. From the technology perspective, I believe that MONETA was really surprised how easy it was to adopt the technology itself. The migration happened, basically, in just four and a half months, so this is something you normally are not able to accomplish in traditional, like I said, data center and data center environment. So, this is from a technology perspective. As you said, journey to cloud is how you migrate to cloud, but then journey in cloud begins. So, another lesson learned is once you are in the cloud, you need to change your operating model, you need to start optimizing not only your span, but also, I would say, optical performance, so basically, the job is not done when you migrate to cloud, it just begins. >> So, you're now at the beginning of this journey, now that you're there, what is the future work? What does the future look like? >> Obviously, we have big plans. I think our aim is to migrate 50% of the workload until the end of 2019. It's a challenging task, because, I mean, we obviously created the base line because we have the environment, we have some obligations, so now we just build on top of that and we still have to work on it, but it's a challenging task, and this is what we're looking at in the future. >> And, do clients feel it, would a banking customer sense any difference, this is the thing, you win awards for your mobile apps, so you're- >> Absolutely, absolutely. I think, the plans for the 2019 will be really, that's going to be the shift for the clients, we have clients to move that are really, like, a strong production workloads, which are affecting the clients, on the end of the day, and I think that's going to be the visible element for them, when we do that. >> And finally, what's your word of advice for other banks that are considering, pondering, this move to the public cloud, what would you say, what is, sort of, the strategy, the strategic advice. >> So, when we are speaking to clients about public cloud adoption, they usually think about public cloud adoption, in terms of technology, like, that you are basically pricing data center technologies, on premise technologies, with some other technology in the cloud. This is not the case. That part of the whole journey, is just a small part, it's about changing how the organization works, it changes the operating model, it touches almost every function in the organization, you know, the business, HR, finance, security, risk things, all those things and functions are affected by cloud adoption. So, my recommendation would be think of cloud adoption from that perspective, it's not just a technology change, you're not just changing a platform for another platform. >> I would have one recommendation, and that is, don't be afraid. >> Don't be afraid, I like it, it's a good word of advice to end on. Martin and Martin, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, it was a really great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, that wraps up day one of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit, we will be back here tomorrow with more. Signing off, thank you so much for joining us. (funky outro music)