How the Financial Sector is a Barometer for Cloud Native

Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast. BankUnited N.A. falls under the mid-sized bank category. Based in Miami Lakes, Florida, it has about $32.9 billion in total assets and serves both the consumer and commercial sectors. Not one of the largest banks or one of the smallest banks in the U.S., BankUnited N.A., a subsidiary of BankUnited, reflects what it is like for an organization in the financial sector, seen as a barometer for cloud native adoption, to make the switch to cloud native. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Felipe Medina, vice president, IT security operations, InfoSec engineering, and Michael Lehmbeck, cloud architecture and operations manager, for BankUnited N.A. spoke about their DevOps’ cloud native journey in the financial sector. The podcast was recorded for The State of Cloud Native Security Virtual summit that took place on June 24. BankUnited N.A. began to make its switch to the cloud about three years ago. The initial idea was to “test the waters” in order to achieve “some tangible returns,” Lehmbeck said. The DevOps team set about testing its disaster recovery capabilities. “We proved our ability to be able to failover between our primary data centers, to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in a disaster recovery-type scenario,” Lehmbeck said. “So, that basically enabled us to get an initial footprint stood up and proof out that our mission critical systems could in fact run in that cloud estate.”