W. Curtis Preston, Chief Technical Evangelist, Druva
In the past, the financial services sector has been known for their slower pace of digital adoption. More often than not, banks and financial institutions would rely on the same legacy systems for decades and keep data locked away in data centres. Many were simply not interested in the cloud because of misconceptions that it was not secure or that would make it harder to maintain compliance.
However, this is beginning to change as myths around the cloud continue to be debunked. In fact, the cloud makes it easier to secure sensitive data, as you simply have to follow the established best practices of the cloud vendor you are using. Contrast this with the hodge podge of security practices in the typical datacenter, and you will see why those who understand the cloud tend to trust its security more than the typical datacenter.
As more organisations in financial services realise the many benefits the cloud has to offer, cloud adoption is quickly becoming the norm. In fact, Gartner expects that 75 percent of financial institutions’ infrastructure and data will be processed in the cloud this year. Even more, many are turning to multiple cloud providers to reap the benefits of the cloud’s scalability and to achieve cost savings for specific workloads. Research from Bain & Company found that this is especially true with larger enterprises, in particular. The Bain survey shows that the number of public clouds used by large organisations, including financial institutions, is almost 50% higher than for small organisations.
The multi-cloud world
What is happening alongside this shift, is that single-cloud deployments are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Organisations are being driven by the need to deploy best-of-breed applications and they are now rapidly moving to multiple cloud environments, or otherwise known as adopting a hybrid approach.
These changes have meant that, unavoidably so, the multi-cloud world is becoming the new reality. Although this is very much the case, the same Bain survey found that many executives in financial services have concerns that multi-cloud environments can become very complex – and there are legitimate reasons for this concern.
What are the challenges?
To understand these challenges, it’s important to note that multi-cloud is not something that just happens overnight. Instead, multi-cloud is a gradual evolution that typically is thrust upon teams by developers and business units adopting public cloud and SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365 and Salesforce.
As organisations adopt multiple SaaS applications and rely on multiple, diverse clouds, data becomes more distributed which creates silos. Information is inefficiently replicated across redundant storage types and locations with no central controls or visibility. In addition, as data becomes more distributed across different locations, it creates more area to attack. Threats such as ransomware remain a serious threat to financial services institutions – so much so that the banking industry alone experienced a whopping 1318 percent increase in attacks in 2021.
How these challenges can be simplified
Overcoming these obstacles may seem inconceivable for some, but it is possible. To simplify, organisations need a single solution that is inherently designed for the multi-cloud world – one that can manage data and keep it resilient across multiple environments. Yet, the delivery of such a solution is far from simple, and requires a specific skill set and expertise to get it right.
A solution that is built in the cloud and offers a single control pane is key to regaining control of multiple data sets. A true multi-cloud control pane must follow three key principles. These include:
- No infrastructure: enables an organisation to scale compute, network and storage resources as needed. An infrastructure-as-a-service approach uses application programming interfaces (APIs) to continuously monitor data assets and proactively address problems in the data infrastructure. The cloud-native solution will give IT administrators and business owners easy access to all the latest technology without requiring additional staff to manage it.
- Global policies: allows an organisation to follow best practices for data management in a holistic manner across all environments. When policies are global, it ensures that an organisation’s data resilience standards are met across the entire environment, while requiring management of these policies in only one place.
- Self-service (with central oversight): ensures any organisation can delegate certain responsibilities for maintaining data resiliency to application and data owners, while still providing IT protection administrators with centralised control. The central oversight is necessary to ensure the organisation and its data will always be protected.
Overall, it is critical that all organisations, including those in financial services, have a solution that can work across all clouds and instantly scale with their business. It isn’t possible to effectively retrofit a legacy data protection architecture into multi-cloud environments because these legacy tools were built for an appliance-centric data centre. Organisations should look to adopt an approach that fits correctly with their growing multi-cloud environment – one that enhances data resiliency and provides a better way to manage, protect and secure critical data – wherever it lives.
