There is an unexpected wave of financial institutions moving to public cloud. Even as many still believe tightly regulated institutions like banks and healthcare organizations will forever be bound to on-prem infrastructure, some on the ground are reporting, “au contraire.” Shockingly, one of the biggest draws the public cloud has for them was once its biggest deterrent: Security.

“Eighteen months ago banks did not have any interest in public cloud,” said George Moore, chief security officer of Microsoft Azure Compute.

Moore told Peter Burris (@plburris) and Lisa Martin (@Luccazara), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, that he talks with C-suite members at financial institutions regularly, and a sea change is underway. (*Disclosure below.)

“Recently there’s been this dawning realization that Azure and the public cloud products are in fact more secure than what the banks and other financial industry sectors can provide themselves,” he said.

Hiring out security

Moore said that continuous investment in best-in-breed security gives public cloud providers strength in this area that single companies simply can’t match. He stated that even attackers taking the “low-and-slow” approach can be caught by Azure, thanks in part to its integration with Fortinet Inc. security products.

“We are able to pull that signal out and extract that information that would not be really physically possible or economically possible for most companies to do on premise,” he said, adding that they make this intelligence viewable to customers on a single pane of glass.

Up-the-stack upshot

Moore believes there is even more to gain from public cloud than improved security; with personnel freed from security grunt work, they can focus on application-level development and business problems.

“We’re moving into this new Golden Age where there’s a higher degree of agility with respect to innovation happening at the application level,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2017. (*Disclosure: Fortinet Inc. and other companies sponsor some Accelerate 2017 segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Fortinet nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE