8 The C-suite is keen to eliminate large, upfront payments and shift to a flexible, pay-as-you-go subscription model—provided there is some predictability of cost on an annual or monthly basis. This includes the Tier-1 banking community, which has traditionally focused on building out hardware and data center capabilities. Not every bank has gone all-in on this move to the public cloud. Still, even stalwart data center builders are evaluating ongoing costs to reduce the technology footprint long-term. A chief technology officer for a Tier-1 global bank notes that his firm has built out a cloud-bursting environment to tackle on-demand capacity requirements of high-performance computing functions, such as regulatory data requests and stress testing. The cloud environment is also used for business-as-usual tasks, such as processing end-of-month, buy-side client accounting data. The firm is now better positioned to deal with the peaks and troughs of processing requirements on a daily basis. A first step for capital markets firms on the cloud journey generally involves pushing development and test environments into the cloud, rather than mission-critical, core operating functions. A chief technology officer at a top-tier investment bank notes that a cloud environment can be a less vulnerable, low-risk zone for trialing new technologies, away from live data environments. Tactical migrations and cloud-as-a-sandbox is a well-trodden path for starting the public cloud adoption journey.