For financial services companies, the public cloud offers many benefits. For example, a recent analysis by the Bank of England estimated that adopting the ready-made services offered by hyperscalers such as Google could reduce technology infrastructure costs by up to 50 percent. Cloud services are also more resilient and efficient — and, as such, less vulnerable to failure.
Moving to the cloud, therefore, is theoretically very good for banking services. But there are some concerns; for example, the concentration of major players that dominate the cloud market — according to tech analysis firm Gartner's latest numbers, the top five cloud providers currently account for 80 percent of the market, with Amazon holding a 41 percent share and Azure representing nearly 20 percent of the market — and, of course, security breaches.
So, what might your institution stand to gain by transitioning to the cloud in addition to saving money? We asked leading analysts and financial institutions for their insight and best practices for adopting cloud services. Here is what they told us.
RELATED: Learn how moving to the cloud can help banks manage regulatory compliance.
Why Banks Transition to Cloud Services
As most financial institutions (FIs) are moving to a digital-first model, where digital is at the heart of their offerings to consumers, cloud data storage increasingly makes good business sense. However, there are more specific advantages too.
“There is a higher demand for data storage and retrieval, and the cloud offers the flexibility of spinning up data stores much faster than on-premises data centers, which traditionally have a longer lead time. Moreover, cloud providers are coming up with cloud-native applications and services to manage data effectively as well as implement cloud-native data governance and security tools to monitor your data loads in the cloud,” says Gaurav Deep Singh Johar, member of the ISACA Emerging Trends Working Group.
Furthermore, data backup and recovery can be done more quickly if a well-designed data redundancy strategy is built up in the cloud.
Click the banner below to unlock exclusive cloud content when you register as an Insider