As firms across Wall Street embrace public and hybrid cloud strategies to boost their tech prowess, one private investing giant is looking to Amazon Web Services.
John Stecher, Blackstone's chief technology officer, told Insider the private-equity giant is in the midst of a "firm-wide initiative" to migrate much of Blackstone's technology operations to Amazon Web Service's public cloud by roughly the end of this year.
"We want to be able to use best-of-breed hardware and software programming models that AWS gives you to be able to deliver features and function at the speed that the business needs and that our engineers are truly capable of," Stecher told Insider.
Stecher described the migration to AWS as an opportunity to take an "advantage over our competitors both in the traditional private equity, but also in just the alternative asset management space."
Wall Street is embracing cloud tech
Blackstone follows others on Wall Street in recent years who have come around on using the public cloud. Big public cloud providers — AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and IBM — have noticed financial firms' increased appetite for the tech, launching banking-specific business lines and features this year.
AWS, for its part, has solidified partnerships with some of the biggest names in finance.
The $52 billion hedge fund Millennium Management is using AWS almost exclusively to give its portfolio managers more customized tech. Bank of Montreal announced in June that AWS was its "preferred, strategic cloud partner." Capital One tapped AWS as its main public cloud partner in 2016, becoming fully-cloud enabled in 2020.
"Everybody wants to move there," Stecher said of the cloud, adding that converting an entire set of applications to operate in the cloud instead of in on-premises data centers represents a difficult task.
"Blackstone's portfolio of applications consists of various software architectures, underlying technologies, and performance requirements each of which requires a targeted approach while still enabling engineers to move at high velocity," he added.
On top of technical rewiring, regulatory uncertainty around the public cloud is giving some Wall Street firms pause from pushing deeper into the public cloud, according to recent Google Cloud data.
But there are benefits that come with adopting public cloud beyond newer tech tools. Millennium Management's AWS-hosted data and analytics tools have been key to the firm's recruitment and retention efforts, the hedge fund's top cloud executive told Insider.
Blackstone's push onto the cloud has also been helpful in recruiting tech talent.
"We have a lot of top-flight engineers that have come in because they want to use the new tools and expand our capabilities and scale around data science and machine learning, for example," Stecher said.
