One of the most important trends of 2018 and beyond is the virtualization of internal IT departments (private clouds) within large, old-line institutions in regulated fields, such as large banks.
The public cloud trend towards using Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc. for start-ups and non-regulated companies are well-established, but now large regulated businesses, who are reluctant to utilize public clouds, are completely reorganizing their internal IT departments to capture cloud advantages and, longer term, so they will be able to hire talent away from other companies.
Traditionally, IT departments in these firms have centralized teams that provide resources such as hardware, networking, and databases. Then, there will be development and testing teams centered around applications. Each application will be assigned its own resources (i.e. servers, databases). It will be the responsibilities of these product teams to manage capacity, software versions, etc.
The new private cloud model will be that the product developers will be relocated out of IT, into business units, and will only be responsible for designing the business logic. IT will still consist of hardware, networking, and database teams, but will add programmers specializing in API's and micro-services. This new IT core will design an internal cloud that provides software APIs to product developers to mimic public clouds.
This means that the banks will now be able to attract future developers—who prefer concentrating on products and innovation, and don't want to deal with hardware or resources. They want to simply work with virtual, limitless "cloud" resources, where someone else handles the details.
