Private Cloud at State Street




There is nothing better than a real world customer case study to explain the value of deploying a product. Cut through the marketing and explain:
  1. The underlying problem / pain points
  2. The vendor selection process
  3. Key decisions and lesson learned
  4. Actual value being achieved

At the recent Wall Street & Technology Capital Markets Cloud Symposium, the Chief Infrastructure Architect from State Street, Kevin Sullivan, discussed how cloud – specifically private cloud – is being rolled out across 20+ projects.


For more details about Mr. Sullivan's presentation, there is a great article in Advanced Trading magazine by Phil Albinus. Mr. Albinus provides details about the decision making process, key vendors, and next steps. To learn more about Platform Computing's cloud solution, please visit our private cloud solution area.



Some additional metrics that were discussed include:

  • Started in 2009
  • Went from 400 to 150 use cases
  • Operated a 6 month proof-of-concept (POC)
  • Down-selected from 150 technology partners to a ‘handful’
  • Provisioning has been reduced from 8 weeks to hours
  • Unique Active-Active two data center configuration for 100% app high availability

One of the four key elements to the State Street cloud environment is the ‘cloud controller’. In their environment, the cloud controller manages self-service, configurations, provisioning, and automation of the application construction within the infrastructure. A key benefit for the developers was the ability to get access to more self-service capacity on-demand much faster. This easily outweighed any cultural concerns regarding not being able to specify to the n-th degree an IT environment request. If needed, IT could still request ‘custom’ but it would take longer.


In addition, Mr. Sullivan highlighted several key design principles driving the design, building, and management of the cloud:

  • Simplification – creating of standards, consolidation, and self-service
  • Automation – for deployment, metrics, elasticity, and monitoring
  • Leverage – commodity hardware and software stack with a focus on reuse of the platform, services, and data

The benefits and successes of private cloud at State Street are becoming increasingly known as their CIO Christopher Perretta is fond of discussing the topic. Some additional resources to learn more about the State Street cloud project are:

What do you think can be learned from State Street’s successes?

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