Cloud migration: AWS and Vertical Relevance streamline compliance – News

Compliance remains one of the toughest hurdles to cloud migration in financial services, where institutions must navigate a maze of legal, technical and organizational demands.

To ease that burden, Vertical Relevance Inc. is partnering with Amazon Web Services Inc. to accelerate cloud adoption in financial services through automated controls, codified regulatory frameworks and deep compliance expertise.

“Our tight relationship of us building the controls has really been a match made in heaven, where we’ve really helped a lot of these big financial services customers build and develop and streamline their operations to the point where they’re not … screenshotting things; they’re not going through very long continuous cycles of their auditing activities,” said Brian Jakovich (pictured, right), managing director at Vertical Relevance. “Instead, we’re automating these things and they have click button activities.”

Jakovich and Jessie Skibbe (left), principal practice manager of security assurance services at AWS, spoke with theCUBE’s Scott Hebner following the AWS Financial Services Symposium event. During an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Vertical Relevance is working with AWS to streamline cloud migration for financial services institutions. (* Disclosure below.)

Driving digital transformation in finance through smooth cloud migration

Smooth cloud migration is a foundational enabler of digital transformation, giving FSIs the scalability, flexibility and governance they need to innovate and compete in today’s evolving market. The collaboration between AWS and Vertical Relevance plays a crucial role in helping institutions navigate the compliance challenges that often slow this journey, according to Jakovich.

“Vertical Relevance … we are a business and technology consulting firm, really focused on doing a couple things,” he said. “One, we work with AWS, and we primarily focus on financial services almost exclusively. It’s having that combination of that business experience and understanding what these financial services customers are struggling with and how to approach that — the different regulatory requirements, the MRAs and MRIAs that they deal with.” 

Together, Vertical Relevance and AWS provide a repeatable, compliance-driven approach that accelerates secure cloud adoption. By translating regulatory requirements into codified, auditable controls, they help financial firms automate key compliance processes, reduce manual overhead and continuously monitor risk, Skibbe pointed out.

“A lot of our customers will say, ‘Let’s migrate these workloads but let’s leave these PCI workloads still on-prem,’” she said. “They’re not able to leverage the innovative power of AWS because they’re too nervous that they won’t be able to meet PCI compliance. Alongside Vertical Relevance, we are able to create a complete end-to-end automated evidence collection system … around 65% cost savings in performing assessments.”

Vertical Relevance offers hands-on expertise, tools and tailored services that simplify and accelerate the migration of business workloads and applications to the cloud. The company leverages automation tools and frameworks to streamline repetitive tasks, such as infrastructure provisioning, data transfer and testing, according to Jakovich.

“From our perspective, we really focus on the hands-on technical capabilities, building the controls, building assets that automate the control development, and then basically creating that entire landscape of everything that needs to be accomplished in order for the audits to go ahead and pass,” he said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Financial Services Symposium event: 

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Financial Services Symposium event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

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