Financial services organizations moving to hybrid cloud: Survey

There is an acceleration of digital transformation within the financial services industry, with half of the respondents of a Nutanix survey reporting that COVID-19 caused them to increase their investment in hybrid cloud.

In the industry’s five-year outlook, hybrid cloud is the only IT model showing positive growth among financial company respondents, and it is expected to increase by 39% in that timeframe. In addition, 43% of financial services companies plan to increase their investment in private cloud over the next year – pinpointing that private cloud adoption is crucial to creating a modern hybrid cloud.

“India’s BFSI sector is tackling a growing number of challenges as digital technologies, digital start-ups and changing customer expectations force the industry to adapt and respond,” said Balakrishnan Anantharaman, Managing Director, Sales - India, Nutanix. “Despite these challenges, we are witnessing the sector implement various initiatives designed to take advantage of today’s digital economy. Recently, Future Generali India Life Insurance Company Limited (FGILI) used a combination of private and public cloud capabilities through Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS to gain the agility required for building digital solutions while storing data in compliance with regulatory requirements. Their technology adoption enabled the company to support 30% year-on-year growth. Nutanix remains committed to supporting India’s BFSI sector as it looks to technology for business transformation.”

Other key findings of the survey include:

• Financial services organizations are looking to optimize their cloud usage: The sector’s top motivations for modernizing its IT infrastructure are to gain greater control of IT resource usage (59%), and to gain the speed (58%) and flexibility needed (55%) to meet business requirements.
• Investment in hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) shows the industry’s confidence in private cloud: Nearly 50% of financial sector respondents say they have either fully deployed HCI or are in the process of doing so, while 38% report they will be deploying HCI within the next 12 to 24 months. This investment is directly aligned with increased private cloud adoption, as HCI reduces the time it takes to build the software-defined, scalable infrastructure necessary to support private cloud.
• Security concerns are driving private cloud adoption: Financial services organizations (62%) ranked security, privacy, and compliance issues as the most concerning when running applications within public cloud solutions. Respondents were less concerned with public cloud capacity (30%), showing that while public cloud has the capabilities to support IT infrastructures, the security of sensitive data is non-negotiable, and organizations are looking for alternative solutions.
• The industry must invest in talent to support a hybrid cloud environment: More than a third of financial services respondents (36%) said they are short on skills needed to manage mixed private/public cloud environments, while 34% said they lack expertise in cloud-native technologies and containers, including Kubernetes. These issues have contributed to organizational struggles to fully adopt hybrid cloud.

The survey spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and geographies including the Americas; Europe; the Middle East and Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific and Japan.