Article Written By: Uche Nwaukwa
As a Cloud Solutions Architect, I have had several privileges to collaborate with a variety of digital startups, assisting them in creating and implementing cloud architecture solutions that allow them profit and grow by leveraging the cloud’s many advantages. One example is a finance company for whom I developed a cloud architecture solution. For obvious reasons, I would like to keep them anonymous.
I have seen these same challenges replay over and over across budding startups, have had exec-level complaints (including board sessions), provided bespoke solution steps, and have had winning results consistently enough, to believe this blog would do a better job than face-to-face sessions have achieved. This is the story of a fintech startup that grew into a multi-national, conservatively speaking, with operations in over 17 countries across three continents, as I write.
Our engagement with the client was broadly split into business development and technical areas. The process was managed leveraging project management skills.
The Cloud Lever for Business Relationships (People)
We ensured a collaborative engagement that reached out to every person in the business – business and tech. That way, we built relationships across stakeholders in the business too, bringing an inclusive approach to the solution architecture (Look out for my collaborative solution architecture article soon).
A show and tell session created real-time collaboration between two outsourced teams: Cybersecurity and Legal/Compliance. Now the tech-dense in-house team could leverage cyber security early in the development process – an erstwhile GTM blocker. Check out shifting left in security.
Moreso, our DevOps principle of breaking silos came in handy quite early and we started harmonising teams and tools across business and technology teams. Literarily, there was a palpable change in the company’s culture. Over 90% of them have siloed work ethics learnt from working in traditional environments. There were no walls with DevOps principles in place!
CEO’s Feedback: You could feel it walking across the open office – our culture had changed as founders and staff enjoyed working together. I never knew implementing DevOps principles would change even the air we breathe… breaking silos.
I learnt that silos start early and grow if not handled – kill it! We recommended using more collaborative productivity solutions like Google Chat, Sheets, Drive and bought into that!
The Cloud Solutions Architect as a Business Development Agent
1. Funding
Before we started, the two founders were a bit nervous as they had no budget to meet forecasts for their payment gateway solution. It was a sigh of relief when we advised that these sessions were not to be paid for as long as they keep designing, building and scaling on us (cloud provider). Info you can use!
With consulting costs off the table, they opened up! They leveraged an exponential pool of funding programmes from cloud providers who provide seed, venture, and growth stage funding to startups. Google GV is an example etc.
2. Partnerships
We exposed the client to cloud opportunities which they still leverage up until date. One of those is their current Web3 solutions (DeFi) for financial institutions. They currently execute 9-figure deals therefrom… but it all started from seeing through an Architect’s eagle eyes.
3. The API Economy
The API economy is simply a controlled exchange of digital services and data between providers and consumers of APIs. It’s a microservices-led economy and communications between microservices (provider and consumer) are through application programming interfaces. This was a financial door opener for our client.
On getting to a technical review of their architecture our team broke down all initiatives, including the payment gateway and biometric KYC solutions, to microservices. We held several cloud business development sessions with the customer resulting in a government-policy led KYC deal and embedded KYC solution (targeted at FSI institutions) deal that transformed this startup to an enterprise worth billions of dollars. What were they doing? They were and are still selling payment gateways and identity solutions using Google Cloud ApiGee, multi-cloud marketplace API products, private offers etc.
The Architect as a Value Process Driver
Framework-driven delivery
Our transformation process was a business-driven architecture review of the current to target architecture required to achieve business goals, joint go-to-market, reliability, cybersecurity, compliance and privacy, API monetisation of data and services, app modernisation with microservice architecture implemented with DevOps, DevOps Research best practices (DORA) and SaaSification. The target architecture was built and scripted (IaC), and a project plan was drafted to achieve the target – milestone by milestone.
Feel free to use the 1-minute DORA devOps Quick Check to assess your company’s DevOps maturity level like they did! All these were at the beck and call of adopting cloud. Using DevOps principles we ensured everything was measurable, iterative and monitored. Let’s look at a tech summary.
The Architect: Using Technology as a Growth Tool
The client’s presentation of their business goals was critical to help everyone appreciate that the current tech ‘design’ (if we could call it that) was unsuitable for a multinational business.
We broke down the gaps into: operational efficiency (especially app modernisation: DevOps and MLOps), cybersecurity (Meet PSD2, PCI-DSS etc), cost optimisation and app modernisation; prioritised them into short (3 months), medium (6-12 months) and long-term goals to build a multi-million-dollar business today!
In the end we won! Please leverage these to win too! Reach out today. Join us on LinkedIn #techie
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About the author –
Uche is a DevOps, SRE, and Senior Cloud Architect with 15+ years of experience having played strategic roles in global fintech, banks, ISVs, telecommunications, and OEMs including Microsoft, IBM, and Google. He has been privileged to advise execs and techies alike on architecture best practices in the financial services industry, dominantly. He has served as an Enterprise Architect and also, a CTO driving bespoke architectures to meet stringent SLOs and SLAs. Uche is an avid learner, a father, and a husband, and likes to relax with a good chess game and cycling.
