Executives in the financial services industry understand the importance of migrating to the cloud. So why do so many organizations in the sector have one foot in the cloud and the other still in legacy IT infrastructures?
Both of those facts are evident in a recent McKinsey report. The company surveyed representatives in the financial services industry about their use of cloud services. Fifty-four percent of respondents expect to shift at least half of their workloads to the public cloud within the next five years. Yet only 13% of respondents had half or more of their IT footprints in the cloud today.
THE BENEFITS OF A CLOUD-NATIVE APPROACH
We know there are many reasons why financial services firms fear moving to the cloud. But the benefits of taking a “cloud-native” approach cannot be overstated. The cloud offers greater flexibility and resiliency, exceptional security, significant efficiency gains, and, according to a report by the Bank of England, the potential to save financial services companies up to 50% in infrastructure costs.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the other, less obvious, advantages moving to a cloud-native platform provides.
1) YOU CAN DEPLOY NEW SERVICES, EASILY
Cloud-based infrastructure provides enormous flexibility. You are no longer beholden to the rigidity of a certain type of hardware and the limitations (and costs) that go along with managing that equipment. In its place is a highly flexible foundation upon which you can quickly build and deploy different services at speed and in a cost-effective manner.
2) YOU CAN SCALE SERVICES UP OR DOWN AS NECESSARY
The flexibility of the cloud allows you to scale these services up and down as necessary. You can both launch new solutions more quickly and enjoy economies of scale. You can also quickly wind down services and avoid wasting money on them if they become outdated or no longer necessary.
3) YOU CAN TRY OUT NEW SOLUTIONS AT MINIMAL COST
Trying out new solutions used to mean months of planning and reconfiguring and allocating significant dollars. The cloud makes much of this pre-work unnecessary. For example, standing up an in-depth analytics program used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. With a cloud-native infrastructure, it can be done for as little as a few hundred dollars. If it’s successful, you can continue to scale it from there, scaling incrementally as necessary.
4) YOU CAN ENJOY SECURE AND EFFICIENT COLLABORATION
Collaborative cloud-based tools like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Office 365, and others do an excellent job of protecting data at rest and in flight (per the SEC’s new cybersecurity rules). For example, Microsoft and touts enterprise-grade data protection and is trusted by some of the world’s largest corporations, including financial organizations. Cloud-based tools enable secure collaboration among team members and can be real game changers when it comes to increasing communication and efficiency.
5) YOU CAN MINIMIZE DATA LOSS AND DOWNTIME
Taking a cloud-native approach allows you to have a greater degree of redundancy in case an outage occurs. That’s because all the major cloud providers have multiple data centers in the United States and around the world. Microsoft, for example, currently has 16 data centers in the U.S. If one of the centers goes down, workloads can be shifted to another. This means that all your data and applications will continue to be available and retrievable, and you’ll experience limited or even no downtime.
How a managed services provider can help with your cloud-native approach
Of course, migrating to or creating a cloud-native platform can be a daunting task. And even after you’ve made the move, it can be hard to gauge whether you’re making the most of your cloud resources.
A managed services provider like ECI can help. We work closely with financial services firms of all sizes and help them maximize the cloud to improve virtually every aspect of their business, from information sharing to improving workflows, to onboarding new employees and beyond.
Learn more about ECI’s cloud migration services. Then, contact us to learn how we can help your organization build its own cloud-native strategy.
