"Innovation is at the heart of our strategy," confirms Ulrich Buchberger, Product Owner of Cloud Platforms at Erste Digital. "While our robust data centers support our traditional banking applications and serve both employees and customers, we recognise that they are not ideal for adopting AI and fully leveraging our data. From both a technological and economic perspective, the cloud offers a much more attractive alternative, which is why we turned to Google Cloud."

Erste Digital's IT team, fully aware of the cloud's intrinsic benefits, saw an opportunity to enhance its experiences with cloud providers. From the outset, they included a highly specific clause in their tender, emphasizing the importance of strong support from their future partner, ensuring a more fruitful collaboration moving forward. "Naturally, our selection process involved a rigorous evaluation of each supplier's technologies. Google Cloud quickly stood out with its data platform," explains Ulrich Buchberger. "But technology was only part of the equation. We were seeking a committed partner with a dedicated and stable team, rather than impersonal support with changing contacts. From the outset, we made it clear that we wanted experts integrated into our teams for the duration of the project." Collaborating with Google Cloud Consulting played an important role in the cloud program's successful execution, even offering proactive support from its teams to assist the financial institution with security and compliance issues, design the target architecture, and then commence the workload migration.

In practical terms, the project began with the design and implementation of a 'landing zone' on Google Cloud, a secure and compliant environment designed to gradually house the bank's applications. This crucial first stage also allowed the bank to establish a solid foundation for future service development. The IT teams leveraged Terraform to automate and streamline configurations, ensuring reproducibility. Combining Terraform with established enterprise patterns in Fabric FAST, a project to which Erste Digital actively contributes, has enabled rapid and dependable deployments.

Overall, the formation of a unified team, comprising engineers from Google Cloud Consulting and experts from Erste Digital, helped to overcome technical challenges and ensure a smooth transition. This collaborative approach also included a customized training initiative, allowing internal teams to enhance their skills in Google Cloud technologies and adopt new development and infrastructure management practices while achieving a Google Cloud certification.

Still in progress, the cloud program is already yielding tangible results. For instance, Erste Digital has experienced a significant improvement in the speed of data analysis, particularly due to the use of BigQuery and Bigtable. This increased performance not only allows for quicker responses to customer needs but also enables the extraction of valuable insights for the development of new services. Additionally, the time required to categorize transactions has been reduced from several minutes to just a few seconds. More broadly, the flexibility offered by Google Cloud paired with an automated and standardized CI/CD process enables the bank to test and deploy new functionalities with greater agility, a crucial aspect of its 'cloud-first' strategy for continuous innovation.

And this is just the beginning: Erste Digital aims to build on this transformation to expand its range of services and further optimize its operations. Specifically, it is currently exploring innovative cloud services to enhance internal processes and provide innovative, personalized services to its customers. The bank also intends to strengthen its FinOps strategy with the assistance of Google Cloud Consulting experts to maximize the return on investment of its cloud infrastructure.

"Of course, the richness of Google Cloud’s technological offering was essential, but the real success of our project lies in a combination of Google Cloud's solutions and the strong partnership we forged with the Google Cloud Consulting team. We created a unified team, free from technological limits, capable of achieving anything. This synergy enabled us to meet our deadlines and exploit the potential of the cloud. Initially, we were cautious, but we quickly realized that the Google Cloud Consulting team was not only highly competent but also perfectly compatible with our own. This joint development, despite our strictly regulated environment, has been truly exceptional and mutually enriching," concludes Ulrich Buchberger.

Google Cloud Consulting is engaged on a long-term basis to ensure the success of Erste Digital’s Cloud program through advisory in technology, compliance, training and organizational transformation.