Deutsche Bank’s cloud boss on regulators, migrations, more

Thad Széll, Head of Infrastructure Architecture and Cloud at Deutsche Bank, has his hands full. His team has enabled more than 200 applications to migrate to the cloud as the bank – which has assets worth over €1.3 trillion, and €821 billion under management – uses a major cloud migration programme to rethink and modernise its expansive infrastructure.

Some of the shine has come off cloud migrations in recent years amid concerns around unexpected cost issues, compliance and lock-in risk. For Szell, that in many ways has made it a good eyes-wide-open time to move and, speaking withThe Stack, he emphasises that the shift gives the opportunity for a deep investigation into what’s happening across the bank’s IT estate.

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“We are fully aware that there is no automatic cost-save from going to the cloud” he says. “But getting true granular cost transparency over what we’re deploying is a massive win for us, as are the significant service improvements.”

The move is also giving Deutsche Bank the “ability to actually take a look at our application stack on-prem and get a huge understanding of those apps,” as he puts it on an August 2023 call: “Some of them are very ‘legacy’ and it gives us an opportunity to re-architect them in the best possible way; take advantage of new technologies that give us scale, performance, and visibility.  The big win, certainly, from my perspective, is that it’s given us a renewed understanding of how our infrastructure and our applications work, and how everything communicates together.”