The sector last year was gravitating towards hybrid cloud deployments, with some caveats.
A financial services industry report hasfound that the financial sector outpaces all other industries in hybrid cloud deployments—hosting workloads in both private and public cloud—but trail others in their use of multiple public cloud services.
Most financial services companies must adhere to strict regulatory requirements and government mandates. Not surprisingly, 60% of respondents called out security as the single biggest influence on future cloud strategies.
Additionally, because so many organizations struggle to migrate workloads between environments, financial services companies have the highest percentage of traditional data centers (59%) delivering key applications. Yet, in the face of digital transformation, the sector faces mounting pressure to modernize IT and to make services more convenient for end-users. Together, this explains why nearly 18% of financial companies have deployed hybrid cloud today, while 51% plan to shift investment to hybrid cloud in just three to five years.
- Flexibility to move applications as needed is critical
Nearly three-quarters of financial companies surveyed (71%) shared their plans to move one or more applications running in a public cloud back on-premises. In the financial services industry, regulatory requirements are constantly evolving, meaning companies must keep pace with changing regulations that govern where these companies can store and manage their data. Respondents also ranked hybrid cloud as the most secure IT operating model (27% of the time) signaling the importance of flexibility, alongside security, in this ever-changing environment.
- The future of work and digital transformation affect infrastructure decisions
Financial services selected “support for remote/branch office users” as a motivator for cloud decisions nearly 30% of the time, a significantly higher percentage than cross-industry averages, pointing to the increasingly remote workplace landscape and the role of digital transformation in customer experience.In the short term, respondents listed lack of adoption stemming from concerns around nascent tools for managing hybrid environments (66%), a lack of hybrid cloud skills (30%) and a lack of cloud-native development skills (23%).
- Security is paramount for compliance and regulation
Data showed that financial companies are running the highest percentage of data centers today, with just over 59% of financial companies. Accounting in part for this trend is dissatisfaction with public cloud, with only 39% of financial services companies reporting public cloud services were completely meeting their expectations.
The report, released this year by enterprise cloud computing firm Nutanix, measured financial firms’ plans for adopting private, public and hybrid clouds. The respondents came from multiple industries, business sizes, and the following geographies: the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and the Asia-Pacific (APJ) region.
