Maintaining Trust While Navigating through a Multi-Cloud World

  • David Moss , Regional Director, Western Europe at Avi Networks

  • 15.02.2019 01:15 pm
  • undisclosed

Financial services companies are extending data centres with private and public clouds to keep up with demand, but does a multi-cloud environment introduce too much complexity and risk?

Although traditionally conservative when it comes to new technologies, financial services companies are, nonetheless, to be found adopting cloud computing as a means to achieve digital transformation. Moreover, they’re doing this at a much faster rate than industry analysts were predicting* while also taking a multi-cloud approach to the process to both accelerate the process and better address a large and ever-gathering storm of marketplace and regulatory challenges. All of which is fine, except that distributing workloads across multiple clouds can be difficult, complex, and costly than sticking with a single infrastructure environment.

No two clouds function the same. And many of the necessary application services that provide security and high availability (e.g. load balancing, Web Application Firewall, monitoring) are exclusive to a single cloud and only offer a subset of the features compared to data centre solutions. Trust is the cornerstone of the financial services and banking industry. Inconsistent and diluted infrastructure and application services can undermine that trust.

Finance under pressure

Financial services organisations operate in a highly competitive and rapidly changing global marketplace subject to all manner of geo-political and economic pressures. The way they do business is also changing, as are customer expectations and preferences.

Here are just some of the more pressing issues that financial services companies have to grapple with as they re-think their approach to IT and look to the cloud for answers:

FinTech startups – banks and building societies no longer hold a monopoly over financial services. Though we’re seeing the advent of a new breed of technology focused companies (aka FinTech startups) prepared to take on the “old guard” with more closely targeted and agile products specifically geared to the needs of the millennial generation, customer confidence must not be undermined at the hands of inadequate infrastructure

The customer is always right – on the back of growing choice, customers are demanding ever higher levels of service and value from financial providers and are increasingly prepared to shop around and use multiple providers to get what they need; when, where and how they want it and at a price they’re willing to pay.

Compliance, compliance, compliance – Financial services companies have to operate in one of the most heavily regulated markets worldwide, with the big banks, for example, spending up to 20 per cent of their budget on managing governance, risk and compliance. That cost can only rise and the best way of minimising it is with better IT. Governments are also capping charges and limiting ways in which financial companies charge for their services causing them to look for innovative new applications to protect market share and boost revenue.

It’s all about the applications

While the surge in multi-cloud adoption across the financial services industry may have surprised some analysts, in the light of such pressure it becomes understandable and almost inevitable. Not least because it allows companies to concentrate on business rather than infrastructure needs and take a much more agile, application centric, approach to IT provisioning.

Cloud A, for example, may be best for analytics and machine learning but, if Cloud B delivers better performance in countries where A has no local presence, it makes sense to use both. As does adding another cloud altogether if it delivers the best backup and failover capabilities. Hence why in a recent survey** of medium to large enterprises, the majority were found to be using three or more public clouds to support business critical workloads, with many experimenting with a couple more besides.

Another trend is a shift towards the use of more agile cloud-native technologies and architectures - things like containers and microservices - to discount infrastructure constraints altogether. Something the FinTechs do as a matter of course, whereas it’s a big leap for the incumbents still struggling with on-premise legacy code who are increasingly turning to the cloud to provide shortcuts into this area.

So, lots of good reasons why a multiple cloud strategy is fast becoming the new black, even in the traditionally conservative financial services industry. But how do you turn multiple clouds into an effective and manageable multi-cloud strategy that is not so overly complex that it has a negative effect on trust in that very infrastructure?

Overcoming the challenges

While multi-cloud doesn’t have to be a problem, issues can arise because of inherent differences between both different cloud products and cloud computing and on-premise platforms in general. Not so much when it comes to spinning up compute, storage and networking resources, but in providing for high availability and managing security – and therefore confidence - consistently across a mix of different public and private clouds alongside the corporate data centre.

Each cloud will have its own ways of delivering these very necessary application services. Moreover, these will be different again from the tools and technologies in the typical on-prem data centre most of which still rely on standalone appliances to provide this functionality or will only be able to share such services with a single cloud. Plus, they can all be cumbersome and idiosyncratic to configure, making application rollout and management an exponentially more complex and time-consuming task for each additional cloud you add to the mix.

Essentially, instead of a truly integrated multi-cloud solution, most enterprises are simply adding multiple clouds to their existing data centre setups and finding out, too late, that they don’t quite fit together as seamlessly as intended. And that, in turn, can lead to good old vendor and platform lock-in, with the need for specialist teams to configure and manage application deployment and delivery in yet more silos, this time in clouds rather than on-premise.

The good news, however, is that these problems can be fixed, and without having to get cloud vendors involved or deploy some fancy new technology. All that’s needed is an additional layer of abstraction to deliver access to a consistent set of application services regardless of cloud or on-premise data centre technology, architecture or vendor (see diagram below).

It’s not that difficult, in fact, tools and products to do this are already available. Moreover, I would urge financial services companies struggling to realise the full value of their cloud investments to seek them out, to turn their multiple clouds into a truly integrated multi-cloud solution. Only then can they enable their IT teams to quickly and easily deploy their trusted financial services applications wherever it suits the business best.

 

*Gartner Says Finance Is Moving to the Cloud Much Faster Than Expected

**RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Report™

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