How financial institutions rely on powerful cloud services

Rely on powerful cloud services

In today's difficult business and economic environment, financial services institutions face changes in a variety of areas: legal compliance, attracting and retaining customers, product innovation, rebuilding financial flexibility and increasing pressure from new competitors with traditional rivals and flexible innovations.

Challenges are complex and changeable. Financial services organizations often want to ensure that it spending is justified, ready for mergers or acquisitions, protect their competitive advantage or expand to global markets, while managing the growth of demand for investors, regulators and customers.

Emerging Cloud services

Recent market research shows that financial institutions, including capital markets, banks and insurance companies, are moving towards emerging cloud computing methods. Analysts predict that these technologies will mature over the next 5-10 years. According to Gartner, Global cloud services will spend $89.4 billion trillion in 2011, up to $176.8 billion by 2015. In total global spending, 2011 will account for 20% of the financial services sector, up from 20.7% by 2015.

Financial services companies in Asia are currently trying to introduce cloud services to companies to maximize IT spending while maintaining a close localization relationship with Asian customers. In short, let the funds play a greater value, and ultimately increase the cost-income ratio of the enterprise.

A hybrid delivery model that combines traditional IT services with private cloud or public cloud services ensures that the right purchasing and pricing methods are provided for the technology based services. This approach can help banks, insurers and other financial institutions choose the best combination of in-house technology, outsourced business and cloud services. This hybrid combination can be integrated into the overall environment of financial institutions without the cost and complexity of managing these resources separately.

It role change

The challenge with the hybrid delivery model is that it adds to the need for high-quality management tools and improved processes, relative to all the advantages. This is true whether a business wants to use a private cloud or to move to a cloud service provided by one or more cloud service providers. In fact, this changes the structure and capacity requirements of the enterprise IT department because more effort is needed to manage service level agreements in the service delivery chain.

The shift in it is to become the "architect" and "broker" for service delivery without worrying about it low-level functionality for building hardware, networking, and storage. This is a considerable shift for many IT staff, as it requires careful management and a clear plan to move to the best deployment scenario, which is by no means simple in all it capabilities.

This model is often effective for financial services firms in Asia, but the need to manage distributed processes is sometimes a big hindrance, as many tools are unable to manage what is likely to happen.

About the wrong concept of the cloud

There is no doubt that data security is one of the often misunderstood concepts in cloud computing. Most businesses, especially financial services companies, are often concerned about the use of cloud services in a multi-tenant environment. These companies also often misunderstand data protection and privacy policies.

HP believes that companies should focus on the actual technical requirements driven by business needs rather than on the various possible cloud definitions, which create real and imagined security concerns.

The business-centric approach helps to carry out a real risk analysis based on actual usage. Today, most banks tend to choose a private cloud model for critical systems, and a potential public cloud model for non-critical systems. But through the right analysis, they can quickly turn to managing the cloud services of multiple vendors, the hybrid delivery model. -

Another common challenge is to underestimate the complexity of managing the service-level agreements offered by various cloud service providers through a combination of public and private cloud models. In this context, the experience of outsourcing or the overall management of third-party service providers can help IT companies to complete rapid transfer without pressure. HP has already witnessed the ability to implement MSI (Multi-vendor service integration) and to apply MSI to cloud services through an explicit goal of managing service levels (rather than specific technologies) across the board, which has benefited many customers.

In fact, the cloud service differs from traditional it in operation. While many organizations are familiar with sharing services from the IT perspective, Cloud solutions offer a new set of management challenges that require it to act as a "broker" role. This means that IT professionals who are accustomed to owning and controlling devices need to change the way they have done business in the past. This change may be difficult for some people to accept, requiring careful management and maintenance.

Overcoming Shadow It

A global bank that wants to deliver it (servers, storage, networks, operating systems, middleware, and applications) through device class mode provides a good example of determining the best cloud migration method for the enterprise by understanding the business requirements.

The bank customer is concerned about the use of external cloud services, because while cloud services can reduce costs and shorten delivery times, it also brings practical problems related to "shadow it". For example, the bank's various business units are busy with their own affairs, ignoring the internal IT architecture and audit functions, which makes it difficult for the bank to meet regulatory requirements.

By working with the bank, HP created an internal cloud service to ensure consistency between internal risk and security standards. The success of this project has not only saved money, expanded the capabilities of cloud services, but also helped banks achieve consistency. The bank now uses a menu to select what it needs, and it takes only a few hours to complete the supply, without a few days to spend.

SaaS (software as a service)

Another typical cloud service case is the solution to the banking system SaaS (Software as a service, software, services) that we are promoting. Many foreign banks that have just entered China, as well as small and medium-sized banks in the country, are faced with the problem of being small enough to build their own IT systems from scratch (data centers, hardware devices, applications) and need a large professional operations team. And SaaS services have emerged to help these banks solve the toughest problem: banks no longer need to build and procure complete infrastructure and applications themselves, and the SaaS cloud service platform that HP creates can provide everything they want: from data centers that meet regulatory standards, To the complex server storage and network hardware platform, to have been fully integrated into the international Advanced application software system, and even the entire software and hardware platform system of day-to-day operation and maintenance, readily available. Banks can use these services immediately through secure network access, select the features they need in the menu, and simply configure the HP team and the necessary clients.

SaaS Cloud services enable bank customers to significantly reduce the initial one-time investment required for business development, instead of a gradual and incremental payment of service fees, not only for better return on investment, but for faster access to the market than in traditional ways; Bank managers are also freed from the trivial issues of integration and operation, and are more focused on business development.

Chief Information Officer Challenge

The Chief information officer is responsible for finding a balance between the shared service business model and ensuring that the traditional model interacts with new models such as cloud services, a task that is challenging. CIOs must decide how to use cloud services to achieve the expected benefits (such as cost reduction, increased flexibility, agility, and so on). Common questions include: How to build a private cloud? Where do you start?

First, it is important to understand the impact of the business environment, because the changes in the business environment are significant and rapid compared to many accepted practices. The business benefit is ultimately determined by success.

Here are three important tips on how to get started:

1. Focus on the big picture-identify strategies that best suit your company by developing strategies and best practices for using the cloud. Some of the key factors include understanding key success factors, benefits, and challenges, so that companies can intelligently determine the right way to build a cloud.

2. Model trial-Identify an area that can be used as a pilot or proof-of-concept for cloud service assessment. For example, provide a virtual server that runs on the cloud and has multiple uses, such as support for developer-oriented development or test environments. For example, flexibility to adjust storage based on specific project or deployment requirements. The key principle is "keep it simple, try it, collect results and find lessons." ”

3. Review and adjustment-Once an enterprise has tested many cloud services through proof-of-concept and learned lessons, it is necessary to review the strategy in the "big picture" and determine what needs to be adjusted. Once the strategy and best practices are adjusted, the next step is to ensure that the transition, including the new cloud services, is properly implemented, and that new cloud services will benefit the business from known business implementations.

Summary

Banks, insurers and others now face a very different market environment, including a grim global economic situation, tighter regulatory controls, flexible new competitors and changing consumer expectations. Cloud computing can radically change the way financial services enterprises acquire and leverage IT resources.

Companies in the financial services industry are leveraging cloud-based capabilities to reduce costs and risks, develop new services and revenue opportunities, and create more flexible and competitive businesses.

HP believes that financial services companies will succeed in the coming cloud era by understanding the business and technology needs, patterns, delivery options, and evolutionary choices of maturing cloud solutions.

Author Introduction

Kong Hoe Chan is the general manager of the Department of Financial Services (FSI) in the Asia Pacific and Japan Region (APJ). Chan has over 17 years of experience in the financial services and information and communications industries and is currently working in Singapore. He is responsible for leading the management of the Department, involving HP Financial services solutions for the capital markets, banking, insurance, multi-channel and payment areas.