AFTAs 2015: Best Cloud Initiative—The Northern Trust Company

Although there were plenty of worthy submissions for the category, only two firms’ cloud projects were named finalists for the award: Citadel and Northern Trust. Naturally, the two Chicago-based buy-side giants had even more motivation to make it to the winners’ circle.

It was Northern Trust and its next-generation private cloud infrastructure that ended up taking home the honors. Scott Murray, the firm’s CTO, says implementing the cloud was about improving Northern Trust’s efficiencies across a number of categories. “The overall goal for the next-generation private cloud initiative was to increase our agility, security, reliability, and performance, while continuing to reduce our total cost of ownership so that we can continue to deliver applications and services faster to our clients,” Murray says.

Murray says the initial implementation took close to 18 months. One of the biggest challenges during the project was redesigning and reengineering internal processes for the cloud. Creating multi-disciplinary skills and bringing teams together to support the converged infrastructure platforms were also hurdles the firm faced during development, according to Murray.

There have been plenty of benefits to Northern Trust since the cloud has been in place. The firm has improved reliability and uptime as a direct result of a reduction in critical (defined as “client impacting”) incidents, while also reducing the total cost of ownership by increasing automation levels, Murray says.

Northern Trust is now able to design and deliver new applications and services to its clients faster through the cloud. New application environment build times have decreased by as much as 40 percent, according to Murray.

Northern Trust is now able to design and deliver new applications and services to its clients faster through the cloud. New application environment build times have decreased by as much as 40 percent.

There is also the integration of the private cloud with continuous integration and deployment tools. This has allowed Northern Trust to improve the quality of its code and increase the speed with which it is able to release applications and services to clients.

Looking ahead, Murray says the firm has an ambitious roadmap in place when it comes to adding new features to its cloud. Software-defined networks (SDNs) and the ability to burst into public clouds for certain workloads are among some of the planned upgrades.