Important Video Excerpts From The Webinar


Here is a quick summary document of the main discussion points from the session with:

  • Adrian Iosifescu, Managing Director, CTO & CISO at CIFC
  • Prashanth Sharma, CTO at ThoughtFocus
  • Sandeep Gupte, Head of Alternative Investments & Capital Markets at ThoughtFocus.

Post-cloud migration success is really about priorities and ensuring investments are made reasonably. Once you move to the cloud, you can shift from worrying about reliability and availability to instead focus on growth and scale.

The bottom line is this - you really must think through how you are going to leverage the cloud to provide additional benefits to the business, manage the expectations of management, change the culture of the technology organization, and provide the availability that is required for all these financial applications.

It is important to manage expectations as technology shifts from a cost center to a driver of business outcomes.

Top Issues To Consider

Practical considerations include cost control, data governance, security, and talent.

Part of being strategic about cost management is thinking differently. You need a new set of skills, you need changes in the culture of the technology organization, and you need extensive expectation management.

Data Governance

Data governance determines the success of your cloud efforts. The governance framework should clearly address data collection, ingestion, storage, quality, cataloging, deployment, backup, and periodic removal. Multi-cloud is the standard and multi-cloud data governance is a necessity.

Security

If you really want to leverage all the benefits of the cloud, security cannot exist as an island. The connections between your different processes, systems and users are functions of security as well as data governance and integration.

Talent

If you have cloud-qualified talent, you can do things that legacy competitors cannot. Cloud expertise frees up cycles for strategic projects instead of infrastructure maintenance. An added benefit is a continuously improving infrastructure that is more interactive and cheaper to maintain.

Outcomes And Strategy

Aligning the business strategy to the technology strategy is essential for success. How you approach this differs across the industry, maturity levels, and more.

It is understood that without a strong business strategy, there can be no technology strategy. In most cases, technology is the business, and the business is the technology.

Closing Thoughts

Post-cloud migration success is really about priorities and ensuring investments are made reasonably. Once you move to the cloud and embrace a cloud first mindset, you can shift from worrying about reliability and availability to a focus on growth and scale. The bottom line is this - you really must think through how you are going to leverage the cloud to provide additional benefits to the business, manage the expectations of management, change the culture of the technology organization, and provide the availability that is required for all these financial applications. Technology shifts from a cost center to a driver of business outcomes.


About ThoughtFocus

ThoughtFocus helps forward-looking companies innovate. We are a technology leader in financial services and manufacturing. Our innovative and cutting-edge technology solutions enable new capabilities to be deployed faster, deliver better user experiences, and reduce operating costs. We do this through executional excellence, guaranteeing innovation, and mitigating the risk of change. ThoughtFocus has a single mission – helping you achieve a better future faster. We are a US based privately held company funded by Blackstone with over 2300 employees across offices in 5 different countries.

About our speakers

Adrian Iosifescu

Managing Director, CTO & CISO at CIFC

Mr. Iosifescu has over 23 years of technology leadership experience in financial services. He led the establishment and execution of technology strategy and the development of innovative business solutions for the Wealth Management and Private Bank businesses at UBS, JPM Chase and Credit Suisse and for the Alternative Investment business at The Blackstone Group. Mr. Iosifescu holds a M.S. in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of the New York University and a M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Bucharest, Romania.

Prashanth Sharma

CTO, ThoughtFocus

With over 20 years of experience providing strategic technology leadership for Fortune 50 manufacturing companies, Sharma is an expert in organizational integration, enterprise technologies, cloud-based distributed applications, and multi-stack product engineering solutions. As CTO, Sharma manages the end-to-end technology function across all of ThoughtFocus’ business lines and customer engagements.

Sandeep Gupte

Head of Alternative Investments & Capital Markets, ThoughtFocus

Sandeep Gupte leads the ThoughtFocus Alternative Investments and Capital Markets practice and brings 25+ years of experience in technology and operations. He advises and supports CTOs / CIOs in developing operational business strategies and information technology initiatives. Sandeep holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from SUNY at Stony Brook and has NASD Series 6, 63 and 7 licenses.