Improving Business Operations and Executing a Growth Strategy with an Agile Cloud

As cloud technology has evolved, it continues to take the friction out of the entirety of an organization’s technology operations, with a corresponding impact on the ability of a business to adopt emerging technologies and apply them quickly in response to market conditions. Witness McLean, Virginia-based Capital One, which shuttered its last remaining data center in 2020—the end of a five- year effort to migrate its entire technology infrastructure to a public cloud. It was a strategic move, explains Chris Nims, senior vice president for cloud and productivity engineering with the bank. “The cloud allows us to leverage the newest technology, effective immediately, and at a significant discount compared to doing it in our own data centers,” he says, enabling Capital One to create new digital products and services quickly and to support the highly automated business processes that run them.

Recent new product offerings unveiled by Capital One include a credit card developed for Walmart that customers can apply for with a text message, and a credit monitoring tool that alerts users if their personal data has been compromised. “As we’ve moved to the cloud, we’ve seen fewer outages, fewer failed transactions, and the time to deliver new features is just so much faster,” Nims adds.