What lies ahead for cloud adoption in financial services
Cloud programmes across the financial services industry have seen significant acceleration in terms of adoption over the last few years. The trend shows little sign of slowing – Anand Chandra and Eklove Mohan from global financial services consultancy Synechron share what lies ahead.
Institutions that have embarked on their configuration journeys in the past twelve months, or are just due to start scaling, are set to significantly benefit from the benchmarks created by early cloud adopters. These standardised approaches and best practices are thanks to a small community of cloud evangelists and innovators who paved the way to both a broader understanding and the overall maturity of cloud, along with how best to utilise native services.
Now, instead of cloud acceleration being shrouded in ambiguity, the groundwork put in by the global cloud community has lit the path ahead – meaning that a business’ cloud journey can now follow various templates and benchmarks, clearly setting out how other firms have successfully initiated a cloud transformation programme with minimised cost and risk.
Due to this standardisation of best approaches coupled with increasing buy-in from C-Suites, this has led to favourable internal and external conditions for cloud adoption – a far cry from the historic apprehension we have seen. The benefits of adopting a cloud ecosystem are clearer than ever before, meaning there is a heightened incentive across financial services firms to be cloud ready or at the very least, cloud enabled.
Helpfully, the stigma around how a cloud set up should be configured (i.e. do you go for an IaaS or PaaS setup, etc.) has faded. The benchmark and reference templates created significantly ease the sell-in agreement through to the adoption process, without having to undergo a month of back and forth decision-making on best approaches between stakeholders.
Cloud’s acceleration is often seen through a consumer lens, yet the contributors – largely consisting of FinTech and developer communities and institutional marketplaces – are often forgotten in the mainstream discussion. Arguably, it is of the utmost importance that these companies' offerings have also matured: they are what is driving the acceleration occurring across the industry.
Engineering “tribes” are beginning to accelerate their learning through structured and well defined certification and training programs, including those from the cloud providers. As a result, the volume of cloud talent has grown, making it possible to develop & deploy cloud programs at a much quicker pace – and at a higher quality – than before.
More effective migrations
With the increased acceleration of cloud programmes across financial services, we will continue to see cloud-optimisation for cost reduction sit top of the agenda for senior decision makers – it is at Synechron what we are seeing with our own clients. However, what we will also see is the continuation of migrating workloads to the cloud but also expanding the use of containers or containerisation.
Traditionally, if there is a framework level configuration change, the administrators would log in to the machine and would have to apply the same fix to about 20 or so different machines. The highly manual process creates room for the possibility of 1-2 servers being missed and, as a result, the code/configuration deployed would have to be redone – containerisation has changed this for the better. If it exists on one, it’s for sure that the fix exists on all the servers. Containerisation helps eliminate common areas of failure, are reliable and make deployment a breeze and help promote CI/CD.
Cloud adoption within financial services continues to accelerate at a rapid pace. With more talent upskilling themselves, modern ways of working continuing to emerge, benchmarks maturing and disruptive innovations and approaches coming to the fore, we are likely to see organisations across the industry ramping up their cloud programmes – at a reduced cost – over the next few years. The end goal? A cutting edge cloud hybrid-cloud system – with all the benefits they bring – of their own.
