by Lyndon Hedderly, Director, Customer Solutions at Confluent
As we look back on the year one thing is clear, the demand for personalised experiences from customers has only increased as has the pressure for businesses to deliver on that expectation. That is no different for the financial services industry especially when you consider consumers’ and businesses’ banking habits shifting more and more online. To be able to stay competitive brands have turned to technology to deliver these modern services and this has included hybrid cloud strategies.
While the shift to the cloud started long before the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, these past few years have seen significantly accelerated growth. The reasons are obvious: numerous operations moved from analog to digital, and from batch to real-time, while at the same time, businesses needed to maintain operations supporting all realms. Hybrid cloud offered an excellent solution with clear benefits, including increased efficiency and flexibility. The issue now is that many businesses are yet to maximise the promised value from their hybrid cloud investments.
Hybrid cloud adoption isn’t easy as there are numerous challenges that businesses can face when they’re trying to get hybrid cloud right. One of the biggest roadblocks is successfully facilitating the data exchange between on-premises infrastructure and the cloud. This is key especially for the financial services industry with the massive investments in owned datacenters, the sheer amount of data held and being one of the industries that is most heavily regulated.
So how do businesses ensure they get the value from their hybrid cloud investment and how do they get the data exchange between on premise and cloud right?
Establishing the data issue with hybrid cloud
While each hybrid cloud architecture is different for each business, they all share the same goal: retaining the embedded value of on-premises IT equipment, and leveraging the scale and agility of the cloud and fully-managed services at the same time. These attributes are key for businesses and industries that heavily rely on intricate legacy systems, but new applications built in the cloud might still need to connect to historical data sitting in data centres.
The major pain point is how the data is shared between the different systems and between legacy systems and cloud apps. These integrations are typically highly inefficient and that leads to major issues and causes system friction leading to errors that businesses want to avoid. A simple example is that a bank has one customer’s address details held on file in the cloud but their other historical data is held on-premise. It’s critical that the bank can aggregate and access data from all their systems when talking to this one customer to reduce delays or errors, such as providing incorrect information. Either of these might cause the customer to jump ship and take their business to another bank.
Handling data in a new way
The above example clearly demonstrates that a new approach is needed to manage large amounts of dataacross systems. It requires an approach that can evolve and optimise hybrid cloud models over time and at scale. The innovation lies in a new way of handling data so that it supports the collection of a continuous flow of data from across the business, between apps, databases, SaaS layers and cloud providers. Similarly to the human nervous system, a data platform needs to act as an instant link between all of a company’s footprints. The platform has to tie together different parts of the business and unite all applications into one coherent network that can react and respond intelligently in real-time.
Specifically for hybrid cloud, this sidesteps the capacity issues involved in keeping on-premises and cloud infrastructure running in unison, minimising the bandwidth and complexity needed for data transfer. This new way of handling data might seem complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. By partnering with the right experts and technologists, businesses can implement a platform and layer that lets data move fluidly whether it resides in the cloud or on-premise.
What does the future hold for hybrid cloud?
It’s clear that businesses who want to deliver modern services for modern customers will be able to achieve that through hybrid cloud strategies. The key to ensuring hybrid cloud performs to the highest standard it can requires a new mindset within each and every business in how data is exchanged and handled between legacy and cloud apps and systems. Organisations can sweat their assets, but the rapid growth in data requirements means that scaling applications within data centres is no longer cost effective.
Time is of the essence for the financial services brand to be able to stay competitive while creating the right experience for their customers. And it will be this central nervous system within hybrid cloud that will enable that sort of success in today’s environment.
