"One of our tenets, when we wrote the strategy, was to be as agnostic as possible to vendor implementations," said Christopher Marsh-Bourdon, head of hybrid environments at Wells Fargo. Rather than integrating clouds together, Wells Fargo will make choices in terms of types of workloads, technology requirements and geographic resources.
With Microsoft Azure as its primary public cloud provider, Wells Fargo will use the platform for core business workloads and bank operations from customer experience to employee collaboration, the announcement said. It will use Google Cloud for more advanced workloads, including AI and data solutions.
Wells Fargo's publicized mulitcloud strategy is counter to how other large-scale, Fortune 100 financial services companies have shaped their cloud environments. Though most organizations often use multiple cloud providers in practice, high-profile work is aligned with a single provider.
With a 10-year roadmap planned, the first half will focus on migrating the lion's share of existing applications into the public cloud, Marsh-Bourdon said.
The end goal is for Wells Fargo to be free of data centers, but the company is not rushing toward that future. It's instead working to make the data centers contemporary to serve as the on- and off-ramp to the public cloud.