Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Gene Kim sets up the next talk by referring to the prior year's KPMG Switzerland presentation from Chief Information and Technology Officer Dinka Gupta, who talked about re-architecting the enterprise to enable decentralized execution, pay down decades of technical debt, and create great customer outcomes. He introduces Vasileios Konofaos and Nandkishor Gaikwad, who will present an experience report on building the Swiss Alps cloud platform and its role in enabling KPMG Switzerland's digital strategy.

Vasileios Konofaos

Vasileios opens by saying the topic is bootstrapping cloud platforms and engineering sustainable business agility. He says they want to give back to the community some lessons learned from the experience the two speakers had.

He introduces himself as Vasileios, leading delivery for Platform Services at KPMG Switzerland. His team is responsible for infrastructure support and maintenance on cloud and on premises. He then invites his colleague Nandkishor to introduce himself.

Nandkishor Gaikwad

Nandkishor introduces himself as head of the Cloud Center of Excellence within KPMG Switzerland and says he is also working for Cognizant Technology Solutions as an architect. He says both speakers will share the cloud journey in KPMG Switzerland.

Vasileios Konofaos

Vasileios frames KPMG Switzerland's industry as professional services, covering a wide range of specialized knowledge and expertise. He names audit, tax and legal, advisory, and financial services as major areas where professional services operates.

He previews the agenda: what sustainable business agility means for them; their strategic pursuit; why specific decisions were made and how; cloud strategy definition and alignment; the functional pillars and services they wanted to build and offer; speed and stability from infrastructure as code and automation; and lessons learned about challenges and mitigation that can be reused by others.

He gives company context: KPMG Switzerland has more than 2,600 employees, 145 partners, and operates in 11 locations across Switzerland. He notes the number of nationalities, gender diversity, and part-time employees, and emphasizes that the member firm is part of the global KPMG organizational network. That global context is important for the cloud strategy and the decisions they had to make. He describes the company as one that inspires confidence, empowers change, and dares to take the next step.

Vasileios then explains a transformation image they use internally with the company, vendors, and partners to communicate the change. On the left is the old world: traditional IT in firefighting mode, manual work and manual files, and monolithic or legacy applications represented by old cars. On the right is where they want to be: a new area with a cloud platform envisioned as a mall. People have to travel in that direction, sharpen their skills, understand cloud services, and gain knowledge. They want to leverage low-code environments to implement applications faster. The image also represents their multidisciplinary model: engineering manager, product manager, and solution architect as the core team roles that work together to bring solutions. It includes architecture and planning, removal of obstacles, process optimization, modern applications, continuing training, product management explaining the vision, security protecting the environment, connectivity to the outside world, services offered by or coming into the cloud platform, awareness of clients, people, and society, and a firewall protecting data.

Vasileios defines sustainable business agility for them as making sure technology priorities bring business value and that the organization has the right technologies needed by the business. Because adopting new technologies introduces risk, they need improved risk-management processes that understand the considerations and risks of each technology and mitigate them. Long-term cost efficiency is also important because cloud makes it easy to adopt technologies and grow, but they must do so efficiently. Global strategy alignment matters because KPMG Switzerland is part of a global member-firm network.

He breaks sustainable business agility into more tangible parts. Business-value-driven work requires an outcome-driven concept and lifecycle-based value generation. Service orientation means focusing on products and services and preserving quality; he connects this to the product manager role in their multidisciplinary model. Agility-centric work means being flexible and agile enough to respond to dynamic business changes and business needs.

He then names three major pillars. First is organizational change: operating model, decentralized governance, and talent transformation, with the right people and skills to support the journey. Second is lean, agile, and DevOps practices: cross-functional teams, value stream management, and continuous delivery or continuous flow. Third is cloud and architecture: platform technology standards reusable by developers and the organization; enterprise capabilities such as content and security; and automation-led efficiency and reliability so the platform can support their people. He then hands over to Nandkishor.

Nandkishor Gaikwad

Nandkishor asks why the cloud platform is required and how they achieved it. He says their objective was to improve business functionality and business processes with the latest technologies while optimizing infrastructure cost. To achieve that, they selected public cloud, using Microsoft Azure as the KPMG Switzerland platform.

He says the first step was to define and align the cloud strategy, with a focus on deployment and management for streamlined technologies. The CCoE organization's key functions are platform engineering and automation for deployment and management, adoption and enablement across organizations, and automated governance, with a mission of improving speed and stability to support business and technical agility in cloud transformation.

For cloud strategy definition, they interviewed business stakeholders and technology leadership teams to understand requirements, vision, and needs. They discussed recommendations with their cloud provider, Microsoft Azure. They also spoke with global KPMG teams and other member firms to understand their challenges and learnings. Then they analyzed the on-premises workload and current technology stack to understand the target technology stack and define strategy accordingly.

The key strategy considerations included defining transformation guidelines, improving innovation acceleration inside KPMG, defining data-center exit with leadership alignment, increasing security and compliance, increasing application resilience, and not merely building applications on cloud but defining a decision tree to use SaaS where feasible. Nandkishor says the first choice is always SaaS. They also focused on optimizing infrastructure cost, reducing infrastructure footprint, and integration with various applications.

Once the cloud strategy was defined, they formed the platform team. The platform team collaborates with domain and application teams through dedicated or shared support, helping with adoption and governance. It also collaborates with enterprise platform teams such as identity and access management, security and compliance, digital workplace, and global teams to improve the platform engineering approach.

Within the platform team, they built the CCoE organization around four pillars. Governance, risk, and compliance provides consulting services to consumers and automated governance and audit for consumers of the application platform. Adoption and enablement guides consumers, helps them learn how to do cloud transformation, reviews their artifacts regularly, and helps troubleshoot provisioning and application-specific problems. Platform engineering builds and delivers the shared platform with landing-zone network, reusable certified products called ISE templates, and evolving governance automation. Management and operations focuses on improving the platform and guidelines for logging, monitoring, cloud operations, FinOps, and carbon footprint reduction.

After defining the functional pillars, the next step was automation. Nandkishor contrasts the traditional approach, where application teams interact with the platform team through request tickets to provision development, test, and production environments. That request-ticket-based system can build inconsistent environments and makes reproduction or reprovisioning difficult, so he says the approach is not recommended.

Their recommended approach is infrastructure as code. It starts with defining cloud strategy, processes, and reusable templates; ensuring templates are pre-secured; and enabling application teams through sessions, including cloud sessions, so they understand the approach. With onboarding requests, proper infrastructure parameters, and application teams preparing parameters and pipelines, teams can provision development, test, QA, and production environments consistently.

Vasileios Konofaos

As they wrap up, Vasileios gives lessons learned and mitigations back to the industry. On processes, they found delays from traditional processes and mitigated them with lean governance processes, starting small and growing as they learned how to adopt processes to resolve problems. Manual security processes need to embed security into infrastructure as code, optimizing security posture through automation and tools. Ticket-oriented processes from traditional IT also need increased team collaboration.

He says they also found that CMDB quality matters. Because the first step is interviewing people and understanding the technology landscape, the configuration management database needs to be in good quality to support that understanding.

On people, they saw lack of cloud skills and delayed upskilling. This has to be addressed through the cloud enabling approach and team, the CCoE, and upskilling the team through continuous sessions and continuous collaboration. They also saw an 'infra not my scope' culture that needs to change because people need a better understanding of responsibilities. For cross-team collaboration challenges, they adopted Team Topologies because it provided a good framework for setting up teams.

Nandkishor Gaikwad

Nandkishor closes the technology mitigations. They added compliance by design during the design process. Templates helped improve security and manual governance, and they built an application cluster that helps application teams migrate from their monolithic systems.