The fact is that cloud is no longer an IT issue for financial firms and card issuers, it’s a business issue.
Cloud adoption within the banking and payment industries clearly has plenty of opportunity for growth and acceptance. Many institutions have already made significant investments in the technology.
Alongside this acceptance, the regulatory implications of cloud adoption for banks must be seriously considered. Regulators around the world are concerned about key issues such as storage and use of personal customer information, dependence on third-party providers and security of cloud infrastructures.
Long-term success in the adoption of cloud technology requires a focus and integration of cloud within the broader business transformation plan. By combining the right strategies, programs, frameworks and processes along with close partnerships among regulators, financial institutions and cloud providers can both transform how they operate and how they serve their customers.
It’s a well-known fact that financial institutions, despite their embrace of cloud technologies, still manage legacy technology environments.
While this is likely to change in the coming decade, two key points identified by our Barometer research are that financial institutions are likely to continue deploying and managing physical data centers, and will continue to utilize single-cloud environments, whether internally or externally provided.
Nearly three quarters of financial organizations surveyed agreed with that statement. However, at the same time, only 39% said cloud was a core part of their business strategy. For those financial organizations that said cloud was a small part of their business strategy, only 42% saw their organizational effectiveness moderately or greatly improve. For those organizations that said cloud was a core part or their business strategy, nearly double that amount, 79%, saw their organizational effectiveness moderately or greatly improve.
The survey also found that those more aggressively investing in cloud were seeing greater benefits — 80% of those surveyed who plan to spend substantially more on cloud computing in 2020 already reported seeing their organizational effectiveness change moderately to greatly for the better.
Given the complex nature of cloud environments, it’s no surprise that having help makes a difference. Surveyed organizations that leveraged a third party for support were 16% more likely to report a great or moderate increase in organizational effectiveness vs. those who handled cloud migration internally.
Slightly over one-quarter of the organizations surveyed indicated they were using multiple clouds as part of their technology operations. From an IT perspective, financial institutions are clearly taking prudent and measured steps in the evolution of their technology environments. Single-image cloud-based solutions will play an increasing key role in achieving business goals, and the use of multiple clouds shows that the technology will indeed play a greater role in the coming years.
