While at PwC, I was part of a team lobbying for the 140-year-old financial services firm to embrace the public cloud. That was heresy! The CIO at the time thought that cloud was illegal in certain parts of the world, particularly Germany. He wasn’t alone. The Snowden leaks had just occurred. CIOs and regulators across the world were highly skeptical and wary of these new public cloud services, clamping down with on-premise offerings. Many IT companies didn’t have cloud offerings, so they were busy poo-pooing cloud in the public and behind the scenes. Senior executives at these companies were visiting our CIO at the time, assuring him that on-premise was the way to go. Wow, 2012 seems so long ago now!
We finally prevailed, after a few years of patiently explaning how cloud worked, how they maintained security at scale, and how PwC would benefit from riding the technology curve of public cloud vendors. We had chosen Google Cloud, moving from IBM Lotus Notes to the Google App Suite in 2015. I think we were the first financial institution to embrace the public cloud so loudly, a first for the industry. Google asked if I’d say a few words, captured here.