Research reveals hybrid multi-cloud is the ideal IT model, but the financial services industry is slower to adopt
Nutanix recently announced the financial services findings of its global 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research report, which measures enterprise progress with cloud adoption in the industry. The research showed that fewer financial services organisations had adopted multi-cloud than any other industry surveyed, trailing the global average by 10 per cent. However, adoption is expected to nearly double from 26 per cent to 56 per cent in the next three years, in line with the global trend of evolving to a multi-cloud IT infrastructure that spans a mix of private and public clouds.
Among financial services ECI respondents, 31 per cent are still operating non-cloud-enabled three-tier data centres as their only IT infrastructure. They also reported having the lowest deployment of all industries surveyed in public cloud usage, with 59 per cent using no public cloud services compared to 47 per cent globally, likely due to substantial existing legacy investments in applications and the industry’s highly regulated nature.
The complexity of managing across cloud borders remains a significant challenge for financial services organisations, with 84 per cent of respondents agreeing that success requires simpler management across multi-cloud infrastructures and 50 per cent citing security concerns as a challenge to the multi-cloud model. To address top challenges related to security, interoperability, and data integration, 82 per cent agree that a hybrid multi-cloud model, an IT operating model with multiple clouds, both private and public with interoperability between, is ideal.
“Information security and operational resiliency remain at the forefront for financial services organisations in the Middle East. As such, they must look to hybrid multi-cloud solutions with integrated manageability and security, and the ability to quickly move apps among cloud infrastructures cost-effectively,” said Omar Malaeb, Regional Sales Manager, Enterprise, Nutanix.
Financial services survey respondents were asked about their current cloud challenges, how they are running the business and mission-critical applications now, and where they plan to run them in the future. Respondents were also asked about the impact of the pandemic on recent, current, and future IT infrastructure decisions and how IT strategy and priorities may change because of it.
Key findings from this year’s report include:
- Financial services organisations face multi-cloud challenges, including security (50 per cent), integrating data across clouds (46 per cent), and performance challenges with network overlays (43 per cent). Given that nearly 78 per cent cited the lack of some IT skills to meet current business demands, simplifying operations is likely to be a key focus in the year ahead. However, IT leaders realise that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the cloud, making hybrid multi-cloud ideal, according to the majority of respondents (82 per cent). This model will help address some of the critical challenges of multi-cloud deployments by providing a unified cloud environment on which security and data governance policies can be applied uniformly.
- Application mobility is top of mind. Nearly all financial services respondents (98 per cent) have moved one or more applications to a new IT environment over the last 12 months, likely from traditional data centres to private clouds, given the industry’s relatively low multi-cloud and public cloud penetration. Faster app development (43 per cent) was most often cited as the reason for the move, followed closely by security (42 per cent) and integration with cloud-native services (40 per cent). Additionally, with a large majority (83 per cent) agreeing that moving applications to a new environment can be time-consuming and costly, it’s expected that the adoption of containers will rise in step with multi-cloud deployments to enable apps to run and move nearly anywhere quickly and easily. Among financial services respondents, 86 per cent said that containers would be necessary to their organisations within the following year.
- Top financial services IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months include improving security posture (54 per cent), improving multi-cloud management (49 per cent), and developing and implementing cloud-native technologies (47 per cent). When asked what their organisations had done differently because of the pandemic, 70 per cent said they had increased spending to strengthen their security posture, 64 per cent spent more on increasing AI-based self-service automation, and 64 per cent invested in infrastructure upgrades.
Vanson Bourne researched on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,700 IT decision-makers around the world in August and September 2021. This report is supplemental to the global Fourth Annual Enterprise Cloud Index master report. It focuses on cloud deployment and planning trends in the financial services industry, based on the responses of 250 IT professionals in banks and insurance companies across the globe. It compares these organisations’ cloud plans, priorities, and experiences to other industries and the global response base overall.
