When Moneta Money Bank made the decision earlier this year to move approximately 20 application workloads to the public cloud, it caught the attention of other financial institutions within Czechoslovakia. After all, wasn’t there risk, both technological and regulatory, in moving key banking applications out of legacy infrastructure and onto a cloud platform?

Despite some skepticism and concern, the country’s fourth-largest bank made the move to Amazon Web Services Inc. and hasn’t looked back.

“There was skepticism in the beginning, people looking for reasons why we shouldn’t be doing it,” said Martin Berdych (pictured, left), senior manager of information technology infrastructure services at Moneta. “Not only the information technology team, but internal people in the bank see that it’s actually working. We are learning, and we are showing the other competitors whether this is actually possible.”

Berdych spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Executive Summit in Las Vegas. He was joined by Martin Trčka (pictured, right), cloud technical architect manager at Accenture LLP, and they discussed the various steps necessary to migrate workloads to the cloud, the need for IT optimization afterward, and future plans. (* Disclosure below.)

Technical and regulatory challenges

The move required continuous consultation with the Czech National Bank and various regulatory bodies. To help facilitate the transition, Moneta brought in Accenture.

“For them it was a huge step to enter the public cloud,” Trčka said. “From a regulation perspective, the answer is yes, it’s possible to adopt public cloud even in highly regulated markets. From a technology perspective, I believe that Moneta was really surprised how easy it was to adopt the technology itself.”

The transition took four and a half months, according to Trčka, and the bank plans to migrate 50 percent of its remaining application workloads by the end of 2019. While its first foray into the public cloud was successful, Moneta learned that adoption required optimization of IT processes.

“Once you are in the cloud, you need to change your operating model, you need to start optimizing,” Trčka said. “The job is not done when you migrate to cloud; it just begins.”

For banks or other institutions seeking to migrate to the public cloud, Berdych had an additional piece of advice. “I would have one other recommendation: Don’t be afraid,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit event. Neither Accenture LLP, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE