You can't hold black horse down: Brit bank Lloyds goes full multi-cloud, signs up with Google as well as Microsoft UK finance giant Lloyds Banking Group is to slice off a portion of its £3bn digital transformation investment and feed it to Google as part of a five-year agreement. The deal will see the banking group using Mountain View's engineering and AI smarts to craft "more personalised customer experiences". A Lloyds spokesperson told …
I don't suppose that Lloyds are doing this for my benefit, they must see a potential for making more money. If it ties up with Google then there is a fair chance Lloyds/Google want to monetise MY personal information.
As a Lloyds customer since 1973 (briefly a LloydsTSB customer but we shall skirt over that) I don't want a "more personalised customer experience", I just want a bank with a nearish local branch, and internet system that works and doesn't have any security blunders, and treats me with respect.
The trouble is I have accounts with two other banks (one now owned by Lloyds :( ) and they are the same. With interest rates now dropping to virus inspired lows, my mattress becomes a viable alternative to store my cash. It is also as likely to give me a loan as my bank would. At least it gives me a good night's sleep without selling my personal information. Or does it?
The modern version of "build vs. buy."
The multiple vendor problem is well known: when the inevitable problems arise the vendors point at each other assigning blame until they ultimately assign blame back on the client.
The single vendor problem is the solution to the multiple vendor problem: have a single vendor so that, when the inevitable problems arise, you have but one vendor to tell you to it's all your (the client's) fault, saving time.
These two positions have been ping-pong-ing off each other for decades, contributing to the fortunes of consultants and vendors, to the detriment of clients worldwide.
There's already outsourcing and cloud here, just add DevOps and you'll have the trifecta.
Ah, but you miss the most important thing, they can name point the finger and blame a third party when it all goes tits-up.
It doesn't matter what the problem is, they will have some way of showing it was nothing to do with their IT or processes. The ongoing fashion with IT is to outsource as much as possible including running stuff in other peoples clouds because then you only need pen pushers who understand bugger all to "manage" the contracts.
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