Instead of purchasing infrastructure and updates for onsite solutions, cloud-based products give businesses the ability to adopt and scale their chosen solutions at will. Real-time updates that improve both usability and security are available on an ongoing basis. Businesses, and financial institutions especially, that adopt and invest in a hybrid cloud solution can easily innovate and try out new programs, resulting in faster development cycles, optimized workflow and better customer satisfaction. Read on as we detail why a hybrid cloud solution may be right for your business needs.
The ability to adapt is the most crucial element needed to be competitive in today’s global marketplace. That’s why hybrid cloud environments give institutions of every size and scope the ability to enjoy the best of both worlds, the security of the private cloud and the flexibility of the public cloud.
While motives for banks moving to the cloud differ, according to InformationWeek, the pressure to cut costs has become a major factor in driving cloud adoption in the financial sector. In fact, it’s believed that a majority of banks worldwide will begin to process many of their transactions in the cloud within the next few years. As we’ve detailed before, a hybrid cloud solution offers the best of the private and public clouds, ensuring greater security along with larger storage capacity. By using a hybrid cloud, financial institutions can maintain control of their data in-house, while benefiting from the flexibility, operational efficiencies and cost advantages of the cloud.
For increased storage capacity and faster data processing, banks can look to the cloud for answers. Another lure has to do with cutting existing infrastructure costs. Many financial institutions have older, more established systems, which continue to be utilized out of fear of risking the transfer operations and data. By utilizing a hybrid cloud solution, they can scale operations up or down accordingly, without adding software, hardware or extra manpower.
Simply put, the power of the hybrid cloud allows businesses to optimize for performance, compliance and cost all at once. Specifically, Microsoft’s cloud solutions can benefit financial institutions in the following ways:
Availability
Former NFL Head Coach Marty Schottenheimer once said, “The best kind of ability is availability.” While applicable to football, the same is true when it comes to your institution’s data systems. Banks and insurance firms are data driven, which means that downtime can be massively disruptive, particularly when it renders critical applications and resources inaccessible. With the hybrid cloud, businesses gain the ability to map different workloads to different environments, ensuring that their individual availability requirements are met.
Compliance
While the term “financial services” is an umbrella term often used to describe a number of different markets, one thing most of those markets have in common is that they’re highly regulated. Not all public clouds or even private ones are compliant with data protection laws and standards. So, even as cloud computing matures, there remains a need for in-house IT to store and process particular data types.
Innovation
The scalability offered by the cloud can also help financial institutions to innovate more effectively. Specifically, it gives them the ability to introduce new products and services in half the time it would have taken previously. Public clouds can be used as low-cost testing environments, giving IT teams the ability to develop new solutions in an agile and responsive way. When these solutions go live, they can be moved to an on-premise or private cloud infrastructure to better meet needs regarding security, compliance and availability.
Finance is a compliance-driven industry that is audited regularly, so the ability to prove that a disaster recovery solution is compliant is absolutely critical. That’s where we come in. At MDL Technology, we’re working around the clock to provide both guidance and support for our customers. Learn more about our hybrid cloud solutions here.
