Why banks are moving to the Cloud…

Cloud and transformation have become synonymous with each other. As organisations beat to the digital drum, the Cloud is becoming the best option to provide scalability, agility, and flexibility. Banks are no different. In the race to keep customers secure, costs low, and efficiency high, banks are pulling out all the stops when moving to the Cloud. Research suggests that Banks’ spending on cloud computing services is set to reach between $70-80 billion in the next 12 months, with the global?cloud-managed services market?expected to reach $319.4 billion by 2031, up from $83.3 billion in 2021.?

It’s no surprise that banks are moving to the Cloud. After a decade of being cautious, banks are changing tracks and getting into the fast lane of cloud computing. But the pandemic is not the only reason why. Higher amounts of data generated by customers (about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily) require higher storage and processing capabilities, for which the Cloud is unrivalled. The Cloud can also enable banks to innovate quickly and address the needs of today’s demanding digital customers while continuing to support data and workloads across different network environments.?Along with enhanced innovation, insights into customer preferences, and other benefits, there are also unexpected ones. Here are the top 5:?

Future-skilled teams.?Future banks require new skills – agile, DevOps, cloud computing, and cybersecurity, among others. But hiring externally is not the full solution. Cloud-related skills are in short supply. Research suggests that this shortage could cost employers up to $22,000 per employee per year. As the demand for cloud fluency increases across the market, banks seek to reskill and upskill their employees to make the most of the Cloud and harness the total value of other emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. The good news: upskilled teams future-proof the bank.?

New ways of working.?Financial institutions must scale capabilities for new ways of working, such as identifying, retaining, and building the right talent for a digital organisation. These capabilities also enable employees to work remotely by pivoting to cloud-based collaboration and workplace virtualisation while reinforcing resiliency and security. Cloud-based tools, including video, voice, and chat capabilities, help facilitate interactions and meetings with teams, vendors, and customers. Digital workplace services enable employees to access more secure virtual desktops as part of their employers’ remote working plan.

Improved resiliency.?The financial services industry has trailed other sectors in moving to the Cloud—primarily because of regulations or internal security and data privacy requirements that kept computing on-premises. It’s also been daunting for banks to move their intertwined, often decades-old systems to cloud infrastructure and applications. But by moving to the Cloud, banks enhance their overall resilience to respond more quickly and tide over physical outages, disruption, etc.

A larger ecosystem for innovation.?The key to successful cloud adoption in financial services is a more interconnected partnership between multiple parties – financial institutions, regulators, and cloud providers - to ensure that the right frameworks, regulations, and processes are in place. This ecosystem, in turn, spurs more extensive networks of partnerships – universities, government, policymakers, technologists – that provide the conditions for innovation capable of problem-solving across the spectrum of challenges.?

Better-decision making. Data, as we know, is the new currency. As the Cloud offers greater scalability and processing power, banks can use internal and external data insights to make better customer, operational, and compliance decisions. With the Cloud, banks can drive the transformation of data environments to reduce costs while using unique advanced analytics and AI on extensive internal and external data sets differentiated through NLP, machine learning, and cognitive functionalities.?

As banks increasingly trust the Cloud’s ability to address multiple needs, they can not only extend their reach to improve customer experience and meet the needs of today’s digital-savvy customers, but also gain unexpected advantages through the cloud.?