Cloud computing is moving to the forefront as a focus for IT leaders, C-suite executives, and board members. Learn how cloud can be a catalyst for enterprise business transformation—and a potential game-changer for how financial services organizations will operate in the future.

Leveraging the cloud to create new business frontiers:

Banking and capital markets pioneers progressively perceive that cloud is in excess of an innovation; it is a goal for banks and other money related administrations firms to store information and applications and access propelled programming applications by means of the web.

The leading public cloud providers offer an array of innovative products-as-a-service that can be accessed on their platforms and help banks implement business and operating models to improve revenue generation, increase customer insights, contain costs, deliver market-relevant products quickly and efficiently, and help monetize enterprise data assets. The cloud also offers a huge opportunity to synchronize the enterprise; to break down operational and data silos across risk, finance, regulatory, customer support, and more. Once massive data sets are combined in one place, the organization can apply advanced analytics for integrated insights.

After years of focusing on the technology’s value as a cheaper, faster, and more “elastic” alternative to on-premise data storage, bank leaders are considering how they can leverage the cloud in three areas “above the line” to create new business frontiers and in three areas “below the line” to optimize the organization. Applying cloud technology in these six areas may help banks drive improved business performance and shareholder returns.

Critical sources of value enabled by cloud transformation:

Synchronize the enterprise

• Better integration of business units through sharing data, driving integrated decisions, and moving more quickly to solve customer problems.
• Creating common, connected data sets; enabling deeper, more sophisticated insights and analytics; enhancing collaboration through new shared platforms and tools, and increasing speed of decisions.

Drive business innovation

Helping innovate and driving strategy to build new customer experiences, create and market offers, optimize operations, and manage talent through leveraging tools such as machine learning, Internet of Things platforms, augmented reality and virtual reality, image recognition, natural language processing, etc. Leveraging new tools and capabilities to increase revenue, cut costs, make operations more
consistent, and retain personnel more effectively.

Unleash new talent and new ways of working

• Aligning tech with business unit needs to benefit functions requiring new talent and new ways of working.
• Tech capabilities and solutions attract new workers and provide access to ecosystems with new skill sets—DevOps, agile, user experience, etc.
• Impact is enabling process improvements such as automation or human augmentation to improve productivity and create firm integration, resulting in agility, connectedness, and transparency.

Build resilient operations

Enhance companies’ overall resilience to respond more quickly—physical outages, disruption, etc.

• Moving from companies’ data center but gaining ability to replicate data and app services across more than a single data center or region.

Enhance IT security

• Cloud providers have extreme security standards—and have a track record. Environments can be as secure or more secure than on-premises—but only when implemented correctly and with skilled and trained security.

Scale computing costs as needed

• Helping organizations with the way they pay for tech—away from heavy up-front capital spending and toward operational based.
• Companies can respond more quickly to market shifts or changes in financial priorities.
• Capture cost efficiencies in dynamic cloud pricing by increasing or decreasing computing capacity as needed and facilitating granular spending control.

An enterprise-level solution

Business unit and IT executives accustomed to an on-premise data center may find the prospect of upgrading or replacing legacy systems with an enterprise-level cloud solution to be quite daunting. Fortunately, banks can approach this transformation incrementally. They can mix and match hybrid and multi-cloud solutions based on their organizational needs, maturity, and readiness; most organizations choose a multi-cloud approach. Whatever the deployment model, data residing in the cloud can be as (or more) secure than it is with on-premise storage models.

Cloud deployment models

Companies can be all-in on cloud without being 100 percent cloud; they can mix and match based on needs. In each option, data can be as (or more) secure than it is with on-premise options.