Microsoft Kong Hoe Chan: Playing 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.

Kong Hoe Chan, general manager of the Asia-Pacific and Japan Region (APJ) Financial Services (FSI) department

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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, the changes in the business environment are significant and rapid. 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 and learned lessons through proof-of-concept, 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. 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 revolutionize financial services enterprises acquiring and leveraging the IT financial services industry is leveraging cloud-based capabilities to reduce costs and risks, to open up new services and revenue opportunities, and to build more flexible and competitive businesses.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)