Madhu Sivasubramanian

Madhu gained a lot of experience of working with the public cloud in her former job as Head of Engineering at Squla, an online education platform for primary school pupils. She was there for 4.5 years, at a time when the platform was growing rapidly. Madhu: “I was quite happy there, but then I was contacted by a former colleague from Hyves – the company I worked for before Squla. He had moved to ING and was looking for new tech people to join him.”

High standards for tech stuff

“Although I’m not much of a ‘big company’ person, I was curious to see for myself how tech works in an enterprise setup. Besides, I had heard some good things about ING as an employer and the company’s focus on technology and innovation. Plus I knew my ex-colleague had high standards for tech stuff. The combination of all those factors was enough to trigger me.”

Cross-border view

“As a Domain Architect, my role is mainly an advisory one. I am a tech-oriented architect for the digital channels in Wholesale Banking. I work closely together with the DevOps, Product Owners and Customer Journey Experts in different squads, who are responsible for the IT products and solutions. I’m always curious to know what’s going on in other domains too, so I continuously try to take a cross-border view like in other domains or with the more business-orientated architects.”

Flirting with the public cloud

Madhu was one of the speakers at the GOTO conference in Amsterdam, which was held from 12-16 June 2022. The topic of her presentation was ‘Flirting with the public cloud’. “In my former job, we deployed everything in the public cloud, which worked very smoothly for us. I took that way of working for granted until I joined ING and found out that the world is different for banks and for bigger companies in general.”

Why’s and why not’s, do’s and don’ts

“My talk was about the why’s and why not’s and the do’s and don’ts of the public cloud, and about the challenges a large and tightly regulated company like ING faces in terms of security, safety, privacy and technology. While the great developer experience does indeed make the public cloud very attractive, I hope I raised awareness amongst developers that it comes with a whole new set of challenges and choices from an enterprise point of view. I was relly looking forward to sharing my thoughts, meeting peers and having an interesting exchange of views!”

GOTO Amsterdam took place from 12-16 June 2022. For more information: gotoams.nl