You Get What You Get, But Yes You Can Get Upset

With young children at home, my wife and I are constantly reciting the popular adage, “You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.” We use it to express to them that they must learn how to handle disappointment and not getting their way, which we can all agree is a critical life lesson.

In my work life, my team and I are hyper focused on helping clients innovate and help alleviate their pain points as they digitally transform, especially our clients in highly-regulated industries, where consumers are demanding frictionless experiences and instant gratification at every single interaction. What we are experiencing first-hand is that clients are anticipating challenges, brought on by ongoing cyberattacks and cloud outages, we read this daily in headlines.?When really, regulated industries like financial services, government, telecommunications and healthcare should be wanting and expecting it all: innovation, transformation, resiliency, security and compliance. In fact, according to findings from a new IBM study, 45% of UK IT professionals and decision makers in highly-regulated industries view regulation and compliance as their biggest barrier to digital transformation, followed closely by data security concerns (43%).

There is no doubt that the last year was an inflection point for many industries that went digital overnight and embraced cloud technology to define future roadmaps. Accelerated cloud adoption was steered by new hybrid work environments and increasingly sophisticated expectations from customers. But, as cloud adoption continues to become mainstream, we cannot rely on a ‘get what you get’ scenario when it comes to security and stability concerns. ???

Yes, glitches do occur as the New York Times noted this month in a story about cloud adoption amongst financial institutions and the growing concern of security issues.?Major cloud outages have not helped to dispel fears around cloud security and downtime, which are causing significant concerns from banking regulators.

In the UK it has been reported that the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA)?is considering closer inspection of cloud providers in the wake of these recent outages. The financial services sector's increasing dependence on cloud technology is probable cause to assess operational flexibility in response to outages and possible cyberattacks.

What I have found is that it’s essential for any organization undergoing digital transformation to have a compliance platform that can also handle cybersecurity concerns.?To fuel industry-wide innovation, IBM introduced the IBM Cloud for Financial Services with built-in security and compliance controls that help companies reduce risk and regulatory barriers impeding IT landscape modernization, transformation, and innovation.

With cybersecurity attacks on the rise many organizations are committing to the latest enterprise grade cloud security and encryption technology, such as confidential computing. Highly regulated institutions will find success when they embrace open technologies and leading security and compliance capabilities as the key pillars to speed their digital transformation.???

The answer to not being disappointed is hybrid, multicloud, as it provides the stability needed to minimize the impact of outages and enables choice with different workloads residing in the right environment.

Complexity doesn’t mean scary. With consistent security across the architecture coupled with a combination of public, on-premise/mainframe, industry-focused clouds, organization can meet regulatory security and compliance data sovereignty regulations.