Fewer financial services organisations have adopted multicloud than any other industry surveyed, trailing the global average by 10 percent, according to a new survey from hybrid multicloud computing firm Nutanix.
Adoption is expected to nearly double from 26 percent to 56 percent in the next three years, in line with the global trend of evolving to a multicloud IT infrastructure that spans a mix of private and public clouds, according to the survey taken in September 2021 of 1,700 IT decision-makers around the world.
“Information security and operational resiliency remain at the forefront for financial services organisations in the Middle East. As such, they must look to hybrid multicloud solutions with integrated manageability and security, and the ability to quickly move apps among cloud infrastructures cost-effectively,” said Omar Malaeb, regional sales manager, enterprise at Nutanix.
Among financial services ECI respondents, 31 percent are still operating non-cloud-enabled three-tier datacenters as their only IT infrastructure. They also reported having the lowest deployment of all industries surveyed in public cloud usage, with 59 percent using no public cloud services compared to 47 percent globally, likely due to substantial existing legacy investments in applications and the highly regulated nature of the industry. The complexity of managing across cloud borders remains a major challenge for financial services organisations, with 84 percent of respondents agreeing that success requires simpler management across multicloud infrastructures, and 50 percent citing security concerns as a challenge to the multicloud model.
To address top challenges related to security, interoperability, and data integration, 82 percent agree that a hybrid multicloud model, an IT operating model with multiple clouds both private and public with interoperability between, is ideal.
Financial services survey respondents were asked about their current cloud challenges, how they’re running business and mission-critical applications now, and where they plan to run them in the future. Respondents were also asked about the impact of the pandemic on recent, current, and future IT infrastructure decisions and how IT strategy and priorities may change because of it.
Financial services organisations face multicloud challenges, including security (50 percent), integrating data across clouds (46 percent), and performance challenges with network overlays (43 percent). Given that nearly 78 percent cited the lack of some IT skills to meet current business demands, simplifying operations is likely to be a key focus in the year ahead. However, IT leaders are realising that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the cloud, making hybrid multicloud ideal according to the majority of respondents (82 percent). This model will help address some of the key challenges of multicloud deployments by providing a unified cloud environment on which security and data governance policies can be applied uniformly.
Application mobility is top of mind. Nearly all financial services respondents (98 percent) have moved one or more applications to a new IT environment over the last 12 months, likely from traditional datacenters to private clouds given the industry’s relatively low multicloud and public cloud penetration. Faster app development (43 percent) was most often cited as the reason for the move, followed closely by security (42 percent), and integrating with cloud-native services (40 percent). Additionally, with a large majority (83 percent) agreeing that moving applications to a new environment can be time-consuming and costly, it’s expected that the adoption of containers will rise in step with multicloud deployments to enable apps to run and move nearly anywhere quickly and easily. Among financial services respondents, 86 percent said that containers will be important to their organisations within the next year.
Top financial services IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months include improving security posture (54 percent), improving multicloud management (49 percent), and developing and/or implementing cloud-native technologies (47 percent). When asked what their organisations had done differently because of the pandemic, 70 percent said they had increased spending to strengthen their security posture, 64 percent spent more on increasing AI-based self-service automation, and 64 percent invested in infrastructure upgrades.
