In one global survey FSI respondents had increased IT infrastructure and spending but still faced skills shortages and cloud adoption challenges.

In an Aug–Sep 2021 survey of 1,700 IT decision-makers in the Americas, the Europe-the Middle East-and Africa region and the Asia Pacific Japan region on cloud deployment and planning trends in the financial services industry (FSI), fewer financial services organizations in the survey had adopted multi-cloud strategies than in any other industry surveyed, trailing the global average by 10%.

Financial services respondents’ also reflected having the lowest deployment of all industries surveyed in public cloud usage, with 59% using no public cloud services compared to 47% across industries globally.

Other key findings from the survey report include:

  • Common cloud strategy challenges cited by FSI respondents included security (50%), integrating their data across multiple clouds (46%), and performance challenges with network overlays (43%)
  • 78% of global FSI respondents cited they lacked some IT skills to meet current business demands; 82% had ‘agreed’ to prompts that hybrid multi-cloud was the ideal operating infrastructure for cloud computing
  • 98% of FSI respondents had moved one or more applications to a new IT environment over the last year, citing faster app development (43%), security (42%), and integrating with cloud-native services (40%) as the top drivers: 83% ‘agreed’ to prompts that “moving a workload to a new cloud environment can be costly and time-consuming” as an indication of rising adoption of containers
  • Top financial services IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months included: improving security posture (54%), storage (41%), improving multi-cloud management (49%), and developing and/or implementing cloud-native technologies (47%)
  • Respondents indicated that due to the business challenges posed by the global pandemic, they had increased their IT spending to bolster their security posture (70%), implemented AI-based self-service technology (64%), and upgraded existing IT infrastructure (64%)

According to Anand Akela, VP of Product and Solutions Marketing, Nutanix, which commissioned the survey: “As information security and operational resiliency remain front and center for financial services organizations, they must look to… cloud solutions with integrated manageability and security, and the ability to quickly move apps among cloud infrastructures cost-effectively.”