Still, big concerns exist. While 44% of financial services hope to make the switch within the next two years, many still worry about making the change to a hybrid cloud.
The main concerns? Runaway spending and worries over ever-increasing security breaches in public cloud, according to Bansal.
“In order to fully realize the benefits of hybrid clouds, users need to gain more control over their public cloud consumption,” said Bansal. “The ease of resource deployment in public clouds lends itself to runaway costs and blind spots when it comes to ensuring security baselines are met. If your team is consuming public cloud services without automated governance policies in place, your business is essentially sitting on a ticking time bomb. Building governance policies with global visibility along with granular enforcement can help to control cloud spend and mitigate security vulnerabilities.”
He pointed out there are also time and costs associated with moving applications from a traditional data center to a cloud environment that need to be accounted for when evaluating the cost feasibility of a hybrid cloud strategy.
“There is a high cost associated with re-architecting legacy applications that have been running in on-premises environments and pushing them to public clouds,” Bansal said. “Not every legacy application can be, or should be, re-architected for public clouds. The benefits of moving some legacy applications from on-premise to the cloud may not be enough to warrant spending time and money to re-architect them. Thus, it may be better to leave some applications where they are instead of moving them to public cloud.”
Bansal also says some people may argue that you can just lift and shift legacy applications to the cloud, but that’s not necessarily the ideal solution.
“We’ve seen customer stories where their budgets blow up if they simply lift and shift applications into the cloud and they end up moving them back on-premises,” he said. “Some legacy applications are better left in private clouds, some burstable applications are better in public clouds. Financial services tend to work with a mix of both styles of applications – hence their need for hybrid cloud architectures.”
Matching Cloud to Workload
Flexibility, interoperability, and app mobility may be the key benefits for financial services looking to switch to a hybrid cloud.
“Certain cloud environments are better suited for certain workloads,” Bansal said. “Financial services tend to be cost-conscious when making cloud purchasing decisions, and they like the flexibility of not being locked into a single cloud vendor, which could be better from a cost perspective.”
Bansal also said financial services also run apps that need to be “burstable on-demand” — meaning they can exceed a specified usage threshold for a brief period and then return to their “steady state.” For example, financial services need technology that can handle any sudden influxes that may come from changes in the market that cause a huge spike in users logging into their applications for time critical financial transactions. A hybrid cloud allows these applications to succeed in this type of business environment while maintaining higher levels of application security than a public cloud-only solution.
“Hence, a hybrid cloud environment ends up being more ideal than a single cloud solution for financial services applications,” Bansal said.
Even more so than burstability, financial services believe a hybrid cloud would better allow interoperability between cloud types. Nearly all respondents in the Enterprise Cloud Index survey (97%) believe app mobility across any cloud is a top priority.
Cloud computing is a huge component of the global IT industry, and it’s only expected to grow. Bansal said we’re living in a technological time when every aspect of daily life, including our finances, needs the right infrastructure to meet our needs. If financial services leaders fail to innovate and upgrade their technology, they risk losing customers and undermining their business.
Bansal said this is why implementing a hybrid cloud environment that allows applications and data to seamlessly benefit from both public and private clouds, without needing any retooling or re-architecting, is ideal for financial services applications.
Hilarey Wojtowicz is an experienced digital media editor with a passion for personal finance and career development. She holds a master's in journalism from the University of Missouri and a bachelor's in journalism from The College of New Jersey.
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