So then if I expand that. Two years ago we launched DevCloud, UBS DevCloud, which is truly an open ecosystem built on the public cloud where all our software engineers can have a seamless experience. from developer to tester, deploying solutions while they’re running. That helps increase time to market, while also reducing costs, which clearly impacts customers. With DevCloud, we can also continuously improve our applications, so they will never be 10 years old, but instead they will continue to be relevant.
Now the biggest benefit of moving to the cloud is that what used to be, for example, five days, now takes just one day, which increases the productivity of our engineers and makes it a place great to work with. Here we have an idiom that we use quite a lot, which is, “All engineers, all developers wait at the same pace.” So anything we can do to reduce their waiting time is value added. If we have the best technical talent, if we have the best background, we can create the best experience for our customers, in terms of how they engage and interact with us.
Laurel: You mentioned cloud computing, and to create a clearer timeline here, in late 2018 UBS announced a plan to make the company more efficient through cloud computing. cloud. Then, as of February 2021, it was far ahead of that schedule, with 50% of its computing activity taking place in the private and public cloud. So obviously, a big transition, if you’re talking, just in 2016, of mainframes, but what has that transition to the cloud allowed the company to do?
Mike: The strategy we set out at the end of 2018 was to move, over the next four years, towards a one-third, one-third, one-third cloud setup. So a third is hosted on a private cloud, a third public cloud, and a third on mainframes. And we want to have super clear goals, to try to transform and transform the organization, and then how do we progress and what that means. We are ahead of planning what we want to do. I will also say that our progress in the cloud has prepared us for the unpredictable and we have seen that through COVID we have seen it through the massive spike in volume. , which occurs at a high level, due to a number of situations around the world. We need greater capacity to handle high volumes of transactions and with the cloud you have explosive elasticity, because you can explode for more capacity. At the same time, we can always ensure that our business-critical applications stay stable and, in fact, our availability is above 99.999%. So, five out of nine likely ready, and that really puts us in the group of leaders in the financial industry.
Also, since we’ve set up cloud-based employees, which we call A3, anytime, anywhere, from any device, which is now a workspace, we’ve enabled 95% Your employees work from home. So we’ve seen over 60,000 concurrently logged in users, a significant increase in the use of connectivity tools, so 3 million Skype calls per week. Ultimately, the cloud makes us more flexible, more stable, more transparent, I think it’s much easier to facilitate our facilitation with other ecosystems. All this is great for our customers. It’s something I keep repeating, even the seemingly unrelated part means we can respond more quickly to their needs and really maintain security.
Laurel: Part of this company-wide initiative to think more strategically about those technology investments, UBS recently joined the Green Software Foundation as a steering member, in part to support help the company drive net zero greenhouse gas emissions across all of its operations by 2050. So how does participating in the Green Software Fund affect the choices you make when building and deploying Software declaration?
Mike: Well, I mean, on a strategic level, UBS is completely committed to sustainability and I think as an individual, as well as a GEB member, that’s an overall priority. We have thousands of active applications globally, and I think one of the big steps we take in our growth is not just accelerating digital transformation, but making do we make it the right way? So how do we use those principles of greener development as a huge, integral part of our approach going forward?
We’ve made progress in reducing our carbon footprint, and that could be moving from on-premises data centers to the cloud, or reducing or truly eliminating idle, power-hungry resources. . Now we’re also looking more and more into whether we can use carbon-aware apps and then users can make choices with the lowest emissions. The Green Software Foundation is a really great team, working with them to share their knowledge and best practices with other members is part of their journey to continue cutting carbon emissions. I think we, along with others, can really lead here.
