Financial services organizations like banks and insurance companies are mandated to meet higher security and privacy standards than just about any industry. At the same time, they are faced with increasing pressures to modernize customer experiences, mitigate fraud, and deliver more insights from their rapidly- expanding stores of transactional data.
Many corporate information executives are faced with finding the ideal hybrid cloud balance. Hosting integrated application data across public and private clouds and on-premises requires flexible, scalable architecture, deep experience, and broad expertise across multiple cloud platforms.
Here are some key benefits of hybrid cloud environments for financial services institutions.
1. Security
High-profile security breaches in 2020 hit businesses across all industries, including the Fifth Third Bank, and the Dave Mobile banking application, compromising millions of client records. These events, as well as a headline-grabbing security bug in April of 2021, have compelled many banks, insurers, and fintech companies to move data loads to their private clouds while maintaining other services on public cloud platforms.
Many institutions are finding ways to improve their security posture and discover opportunities like online customer interactions that are well-suited to the public cloud. They can then create secure integration paths into applications behind firewalls and layers of encryption that manage customer transactions and their holdings. Some banks and insurance companies have migrated data back into their private cloud environments and data centers. Hybrid cloud environments enable frictionless migration between cloud platforms while mitigating data loss.
2. Compliance and Audit Readiness
Banks need to meet strict reporting regulations whether they do business in a single country, or internationally. Hybrid architecture enables data to reside in multiple private and public cloud servers while supporting a centralized reporting and monitoring system. Network operations centers can monitor the stability, security, and availability of on-premise and offsite computing resources from centralized dashboards.
Though hybrid cloud services ease migration between clouds, it also enables administrators greater control over what information is sent to public cloud resources. Some compliance requirements dictate that certain data can’t be hosted in public cloud services, and hybrid enables greater governance and control over multiple environments.
3. Continuous Development, Deployment, and Integration
Challenger banks and other disruptive fintech companies are forcing established financial service providers to continuously innovate to protect their market share. Hybrid development and integration environments help banks and insurance companies to develop new functionality for their internal and customer-facing systems without impacting production systems. To keep pace with industry disruptors banks, exchanges, and insurers need cloud platforms that can enable continuous development, deployment, delivery, and integration.
Hybrid cloud infrastructure facilitates the management of multiple development, test, staging, production, and backup/recovery environments. By orchestrating multiple environments, and automating testing and backup processes, even the largest and most conservative financial service providers can be more agile and resilient.
4. Hybrid Cloud and DevOps
For those finance companies that have adopted methodologies like DevOps and DevSecOps, hybrid cloud is an ideal computing architecture. As described above, hybrid environments facilitate continuous delivery and process automation. Development can take place in on-premise or cloud environments (or both), depending on the organization’s preference.
DevOps professionals can orchestrate integration, interoperability, and performance across multiple clouds and cloud platforms. Running distinct cloud environments can help banks to move from monolithic to microservice architectures, and adopt an orchestrated development containers strategy.
5. Running Legacy and Cloud Systems in Harmony
Most financial services companies have legacy systems that support business-critical functions. They represent significant capital investment, which was made to carry them years into the future. Cloud services can complement these legacy systems, and shift the burden of data processing and user interface workloads away from legacy applications.
6. Address Skills Gaps
According to InformationWeek, hybrid cloud services are driving transformation in IT teams, and creating more flexible, strategy-oriented mindsets. It can, however, be challenging for banks to recruit, retain, and train staff that is skilled with the latest development and cloud platform management skills.
Managed service providers and consulting companies that partner with cloud platform providers like Microsoft, AWS, and Google are helping financial services firms to address their skills gaps. Professional services vendors can provide short-term skills coverage while companies train their existing staff. Managed services providers can provide long-term support to banks or insurers with the necessary skills and finance industry expertise.
Then, there are the solution providers like Indellient that offer both managed and professional services to companies with evolving hybrid cloud priorities. Juggling responsibilities like data security, application modernization, data migration, and regulatory compliance is difficult for even the largest financial services organizations.
Indellient can help you manage these objectives and your cloud application development and management requirements. Let’s talk.
Custom Cloud Solutions
Indellient takes a customer-first approach to help you build a modern cloud strategy on Amazon Web Services. Our team can help you build, re-platform, migrate and integrate applications, so you can benefit from the scalability, agility, and performance available through cloud technologies.
Indellient is an IT Professional Services Company that specializes in Data Analytics, Cloud Development & Management, Managed IT Solutions, DevOps Services, and Business Process Management.
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