Faced with increasing customer expectations and recent technology advancements, organizations are under immense pressure to migrate to the cloud. Transition to cloud provides flexibility and security, enabling financial institutions to keep pace with the market’s evolving expectations for a highly accessible, and continuously improving user experience. It promotes organizational efficiency and enables the organization to instantly access and share information from anywhere, anytime. As a result, business leaders can easily collaborate, meet critical deadlines, and respond to customer demands more efficiently.

Moving to the cloud was once a distant goal for most industries. But post the pandemic, it has become a go-to strategy for all IT leaders. A recent Accenture report states that in banking, cloud investments have grown significantly and are forecasted to continue at 15 percent per year from 2020 to 2022.

Insurance companies are looking at cloud as a worthy investment. According to Insurance Trends report by Deloitte, cloud computing is second only to cybersecurity as a spending priority, with 59 percent of executives expecting some level of increased investment in cloud computing while 17 percent expecting a substantial increase in spend.

The Uphill Battle

Easier said than done, cloud migration might look simple on paper, however, there is a lot of resistance from incumbent stakeholders towards the new change. Successful cloud migration requires a rewrite of application architectures, investment in the required skillsets and tools, and training for end-users on the new systems. Without proper analysis and roadmap beforehand, many organizations may falter along the way.

Organizations and their IT leaders see the cost of cloud as an opportunity and a safe bet, rather than investing in recreating older applications on-premises. The latter would typically risk deeper lock-in if organizations let a single vendor provide and manage business-critical applications and control the underlying data.

Digital transformation landscape is promising maturity and delivering on its promises to improve organization’s efficiency and performance. But cloud adoption and digital journeys have come to a standstill for some of them due to unfamiliarity and inexperience towards the approach, and the complexity of securing the cloud.

Data Security – The bigger concern

The concern for most organizations is moving sensitive data to an unknown territory 30,000 feet away. Most industries, primarily financial services, banking, and insurance, have data regulations and mandates to secure and retain the data on-premises or to a data center within borders. Since, most OEMs have set shop in India and have introduced data centers close to home, these data security and storage challenges will phase out.

According to a Nutanix 2021 report, 62 percent of financial services organizations ranked security and privacy as the top concerns when running applications within public cloud solutions.

3 Ways to address these Challenges

1. Reposition solutions: Customers have changed the way they consume services in the wake of COVID-19, and these needs and expectations vary across industry verticals. A fresh look through an experience lens will help organizations to position their solutions and choose the right infrastructure that compliments it.
2. Leverage Third-party Skillsets: Understand your organizations goals and outsource advanced and innovative IT needs such as digital transformation, cloud migration, SaaS solutions, etc. to third party vendors that possess expertise and the right skill set to take the ship forward.
3. Scrutinize Data Flow: Create a transparent communication between the IT team and the partnered OEM to understand and scrutinize the data flow and management with questions such as: how is the data stored? What are the measures taken to safeguard it? Is the process in which the data stored and managed compliant with organization’s regulatory mandate? etc.

Conclusion

Cloud adoption and maturity will not solve all cloud challenges — particularly when cloud cyber-attacks are getting increasingly inventive. But with changing customer expectations, we believe that cloud is the way forward to help industries position itself for growth in a digital-first world and virtual customer experiences. A successful cloud strategy is built on establishing the business outcomes that leaders hope to achieve, partnering with the right cloud vendor, and determining the business model that best suits organizational goals and helps them to build the customer experience of tomorrow.

Guest article by Shrikant Navelkar, Director, Clover Infotech