Drew Firment, Chief Cloud Strategist at Pluralsight
Digital transformation is a core area of focus for financial services organisations, with traditional banks offering more services online to keep up with an ever digital world, and stay competitive with modern neo banks. As a result, 91% of financial services organisations partially or completely adopted the cloud this year, compared to only 37% three years before.
Moving to a cloud environment comes with a wide range of benefits. In particular, developers can create bigger systems more quickly and efficiently, and cloud security models like zero trust contribute to improving security and protecting banks against cyber threats – all which makes the cloud a key tool to support companies’ digital transformation and enable greater scalability.
Additionally, as legislation is constantly evolving, the cloud allows greater compliance with regulatory requirements, as well as more streamlined data management. This is vital for the finance industry, given it processes substantial volumes of sensitive information every day.
The finance industry must continue to modernize. Only by embracing the technology can the banking and finance industry increase revenue, boost productivity and remain competitive in today’s digital world. In fact, 91% of financial services executives believe a cloud-first approach is essential to drive growth.
Boosting productivity and driving growth in a cloud environment
Software is defined as anything that makes a piece of hardware perform a function. It can be very programmatic – which means it requires specialised and complicated programming languages, so creating a piece of software can take a lot of time. But as the finance industry is looking to digitally transform at pace, and bring new services to market for customers, developers need to create efficient programs quickly, and cut down this timeline where possible.
The cloud has a role to play here, as it gives access to a range of powerful tools that help build bigger systems faster and more easily than before. In fact, a quarter of enterprise cloud decision-makers cite enhancing software development processes as motivation for further adoption of cloud technology, and 26% of enterprises in the EU bought cloud computing services in 2023 in order to help with application development, testing or deployment. With cloud, developers in the finance industry have the opportunity to create the infrastructure needed for a growing industry quickly, without having to build everything from scratch.
A good example is functions. The first thing most developers think of when they hear “serverless” is functions. But the functions running code are just a tiny piece of the puzzle. Serverless technology allows development teams to hand off as much work as they can to cloud platforms like Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Developers no longer have to write their own code as the building blocks already exist in their cloud platform. Take, for example, Azure’s Durable Functions feature. This feature manages workflows so teams don’t need to explicitly create, store, and retrieve the progress through the data’s workflow in some other place. This process is so common to the systems that teams build that the cloud providers made it available without needing developers to write lines of code.
Securing and managing sensitive data with cloud technology
Using cloud technology also allows for better data management and security standards. With a cloud-based system, finance organisations can ensure that sensitive data is encrypted, and is protected in a more robust and powerful way than on-premises data storage. For example, with consistent security updates, AI tools like algorithms and built-in firewalls ensure the vast amount of data held by finance organisations and accessed daily is as secure as possible from cyber criminals.
Moving to the cloud to compete with digital challengers
As cloud computing makes it easier for developers to create software quickly, it also frees up time to focus on the quality of the product rather than just the delivery. Developers no longer need to think about when they will deliver the product; instead they can simply dedicate time to determining how to make the end product as effective as possible, and adapt to customers’ evolving needs.
Having more time to work on improving quality gives businesses an important competitive advantage. At the same time, it doesn’t incur additional costs because cloud technology enables developers to simply better allocate their time between technical tasks and strategic tasks.
For example, after migrating to the cloud, Deutsche Bank was able to save time on software development, and focus more on developing a strategy to improve the design and quality of their financial services offering as a result.
The use of advanced AI and data analytics tools helped the bank better manage and understand data in order to adapt to trends, and be more flexible and better respond to client needs. As a result, adopting cloud technology allowed Deutsche Bank to improve resilience, deliver better financial services to customers quickly, save costs, and eventually become more competitive.
Cloud computing helps financial services companies establish a resilient infrastructure, and makes it possible to accelerate scalability and maximise customer experience by ensuring the delivery of high-quality services. In particular, this ability to scale more rapidly means businesses can deliver products faster, making them more productive and competitive. Additionally, cloud technology allows organisations to enhance security and data management capabilities, overall contributing to offering more reliable and secure services online.
