12-27-21 | Blog Post
Cloud adoption by financial institutions has been on the rise. According to PwC, by 2020 core financial services like credit scoring, statements management, payments, and billing will use the cloud for processing and computing. From retail banking to asset management and investment banking, the cloud provides many use cases to bring scalability, cost savings, and improved service delivery for financial institutions.
The largest financial institutions have already adopted cloud technology. But it’s not just the J.P. Morgan’s or Bank of America’s of the world. Smaller financial institutions are finding the same benefits in cloud computing that enterprises are leveraging.
Banking has become digitized. More users are looking to complete transactions from mobile devices – mobile phones, laptops, tablets, you name it. To ensure optimal customer experience and to stay competitive, financial institutions must undertake new application development. Some financial institutions have opted to move application development to the cloud where they can avoid expensive hardware costs and always have access to the latest software upgrades. Others have moved to the cloud for infrastructure services to process big data like large investment portfolios and other core banking systems.
Financial institutions are leveraging the cloud to move IT operations to an operating expense model (OpEx). IT hardware and underlying infrastructure is expensive, and financial institutions are concerned about the rising costs associated with running data centers. Additionally, on premises data centers are difficult to scale and any growth requires large capital expenditures. Instead, a cloud deployment allows financial institutions better flexibility to manage data. Deployment is quick, and services are rendered within days.
Creating well thought out disaster recovery strategies is also a major perk of moving to the cloud, especially for institutions with several branch locations. In the cloud, branches can backup and/or replicate data to a data center or co-location 500+ miles away to create redundancy and protection from regional disasters. Instead of building out an off-site data center, financial institutions can utilize the network of data centers from a cloud provider like NewCloud that has been strategically built for DR without incurring large upfront costs.
Financial institutions face growing data storage and backup management concerns. Backing up on-premises means a dedicated team is needed and responsible for the management of the backups. Cloud backup employs the “set it and forget it” process to data backup, which frees up IT teams from managing mundane backups and allows them more flexibility to scale for incremental backups. Additionally, instead of having an IT team at each individual branch, a single IT team could remotely manage cloud backups for each location to the off-site data repository.
The financial services industry is one of the fastest growing industries for cloud adoption. Scalabilty, cost savings, improved disaster recovery, data protection, and access to production resources on-demand are some of the major benefits of cloud that financial institutions are enjoying. If you’re in retail banking, investment banking, asset management, or other financial services, let us help you protect your data and processes with compliant cloud solutions from Otava. Contact us today.