We all know that there's a lot of hype around cloud computing. While many companies won't move their data to a public cloud anytime soon, the private cloud option is very compelling. IDC estimates thatspending on private cloud IT infrastructure will grow by 11.1% year over year to$13.9 billion. Those are pretty impressive numbers. The challenge is to remember that cloud is a technology. It's a vehicle, a conduit to help you provide value to the business.

The real challenge is determining what should move to the cloud. What benefits provide the best value to the business? Do we move everything? One potential area to look at as a first step is your software development environment. In the past, setting up strong development environments tended to be cost, space, and resource constrained.   

But companies like ING Direct have designed high-performance and highly automated private cloud platforms for their entire operations. Why did ING Direct do this? It's simple -to dramatically improve software development agility.  Thiscase studyoutlines how.

ING Direct is a digital-led business that's challenging the traditional banking model. To remain competitive, the company must bring new services and features to market as quickly as possible. But, provisioning a development and testing environment for a new project used to take four months!  Consequently, the bank was limited by the number of projects it could run concurrently. Moreover, when new products and features were introduced, the bank had to schedule service outages, impacting customers. 

ING Direct launched the Zero Touch project, a private cloud that now hosts the bank's entire set of applications and systems, alongside a replica testing environment that provides lifecycle management for cloud components and business services. There were immediate and concrete results.   Learn moreabout the Zero Touch project. 

Cisco helped ING Direct deliver an updated banking platform every week,improve their service standards for customersas well as enable them to innovate with test environments instead of worrying about uptime.Learn moreabout how Cisco helped ING Direct do that.