Jason Poley: Fintech veteran helping Macquarie secure its data in the cloud

This article was originally published on Technical.ly.

When you’ve been in the game for over 20 years, you know a thing or two about building a successful fintech strategy. All you need next is a company ready to invest in the process.

Jason Poley, a software industry veteran based in Philadelphia who has worked for various financial services firms, was intrigued by the moves Macquarie was making in the way of cloud adoption and migration.

“Lack of proper cloud and digital strategies can cause problems for many organizations,” said Poley. “The ongoing global health pandemic and the shift to remote working continues to threaten businesses that aren’t prepared. Macquarie has a solid plan for its digital future, wisely investing resources in what I believe to be the right things.”

Specifically, Poley noted how Macquarie embraces emerging digital technologies, such as migrating workloads to cloud native and serverless, enabling the group to secure and modernize its data storage via the cloud. In fact, the approach Macquarie is taking is “public cloud right, public cloud first” with plans to host the vast majority of applications that are not SaaS on the public cloud. Already well into this, they are rethinking and re-engineering all the apps they migrate to be built in a public cloud-native manner for resiliency and agility.

“The daily rigor and control a business takes to protect assets is more than most companies can do themselves,” he said.

Today Poley is 12 months into his role as a senior engineer and architect at Macquarie and leading the cloud migration of the firm’s asset management division. An independent contributor (i.e., no direct reports), Poley works hands-on as an engineer, a coach and as a thought leader. His role is to encourage Macquarie’s global technology workforce to adopt an “engineering culture and cloud mentality,” which translates to the following two concepts.

The first is to never do something “just because.” Break down and think through problems and how to approach them to still achieve the same result.

For example, for financial institutions today, one of those problems is the threat to data security. The proposed solution, in Poley’s eyes, is automation.

In the past, companies often didn’t trust automation, preferring the sense of control they maintained doing things manually. These days, automating the migration of sensitive information to the cloud is essential for one very big reason: human error.

“The fewer humans that have access to passwords and private information, the safer it is generally,” said Poley.

The second concept is to introduce technology that will drive business goals and always think about the future, not just drop jaws. In this case, Poley says the teams are starting to see real benefits from their usage of serverless which has been enabling them to deploy their workloads more efficiently and economically, and to spend more time delivering business value and new features so they can adapt quickly to take advantage of change.

Although he always looks for opportunities to integrate emerging technologies into Macquarie’s arsenal, Poley doesn’t believe it should come at the cost of human brain power. It’s not about replacing humans with technology, it’s about embracing technology in a way that enables employees to do the best work possible — something in which he’s actively invested, especially since COVID-19 led organizations to adapt to a remote working model, while local quarantine guidelines were followed.

From his home, Poley hosts daily virtual cloud and engineering workshops to help people work through challenges and keep the engineering culture alive.

Macquarie is committed to the adoption of engineering culture and upskilling its staff, and it now offers all employees in its Corporate Operations Group access to a Technology Education Portal. Here, employees from Human Resources to Business Development can become certified in the areas of data tooling, agile and cloud technologies.

Poley credits Macquarie with encouraging his entrepreneurial attitude.

“And that’s important because people want to see the results of their efforts. They want to see progress.”