5 Key Benefits of Adopting Cloud Infrastructure in Financial Institutions

September 15, 2019

Niall Twomey

In a previous post, we explored the trends and drivers for financial institutions (FIs) towards a cloud-based environment. In this post, Niall Twomey, CTO for Fenergo, looks at five key benefits that FIs can realize by migrating their IT to the cloud.

The financial sector has been slow to move to a cloud-based environment. Understandable concerns around data security are often cited as a key reason, but those FIs that do take the step towards the cloud can expect to realize a number of huge business benefits. Here, we explore the five main benefits of migrating to the cloud.

1. Increased Cost Management and Transparency

Every organization wants to be able to control costs, enjoy visibility regarding where spend is going, and be able to gauge return on investment. The cloud enables this.

Cost management is a key consideration for FIs when considering the cloud. Organizations are very adamant that they need to control, monitor and budget costs, and a lot of the third-party and native cloud tools enable them to do this very easily. Items such as spend alerts can be put in place to ensure that you don’t get any nasty surprises at the end of the billing period.

Financial institutions are often attracted by the knowledge that they will only pay for what they use. They can shut down environments that their organization is not using when they don’t need it and only pay for the portion of the time that they are operational. This helps Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) alike to plan more effectively.

A CTO at a tier one global bank and a Fenergo client recently told us: “Cost transparency is a key tenet for us, as with the cloud it can be more cost effective. We can show a business case pay back to that end and there are a lot of benefits to showing from an OpEx model perspective that technology can be delivered from a cost perspective in a more effective manner.”

2. Faster Time to Market

CTOs at financial institutions are under extraordinary pressure to deliver implementations faster. Whether it’s in the cloud or on-premise, everyone wants implementations to happen instantaneously.

That’s where the cloud delivers a huge business advantage. For example, by using infrastructure as code as part of a cloud implementation, environments with fully working applications can be deployed within a couple of hours, where before in more traditional models, you could have been talking days or weeks to get something similar done.

From an agility standpoint, because the cloud is built for the digital marketplace, it’s possible to deliver in shorter time frames, and deploy technology more quickly. The cloud can also enable a DevSecOps-type model to enable organizations, to deliver their own secure software on the platform.

In the cloud, organizations can establish enterprise-approved and repeatable patterns for delivering, which are well suited for a very scalable environment.

3. Stability

Stability is another key consideration for FIs looking to operate in the cloud. Regardless of the platform they run on, stability is essential. In the cloud, stability means reliability; FIs can rest assured that in the event of a problem in one location, they have business continuity as other servers in the cloud will act as backup. CTOs can also add new functionality without disruption.

4. Scalability

5. High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Financial institutions’ reputations rely on 24/7/365 reliability. There’s no downtime, so high availability and disaster recovery are critical. Both are easy to achieve at a relatively inexpensive cost with cloud technology.

With the cloud, if one site is down another will pick up the slack, so the business can continue to function in the case of a disaster in one location.

Are you ready to explore the benefits of cloud technology at your financial institution? Get in touch to see how we could help.