Most commonly in the financial services industry there is a belief that the only way to secure data is to lock it down in private, company-controlled servers and this will protect their data. It is a challenge to drive consistent governance and tooling in these traditional environments, even more so in complex it environments. The cloud helps organisations to overcome these governance challenges and help them more easily apply new technologies to further enhance security.
Building on the cloud and the developments done by the large-scale cloud service providers allows IT to build governance into its deployment model and treat infrastructure and basic services as commodities. The cloud allows services and storage subsystems to be highly observable and enable governance more easily than in traditional on-premise hosting. Technology and security teams can be able to easily implement security and governance policies much more rapidly because many of them are built into the solutions rather than an afterthought. IT teams are able to provide the business with a state-of-the-art and industry-standard security and governance policies implementation.
The cloud makes it easy to provide teams with the standard tools to monitor access to new environments. Lowering the skill required and reducing the overall time needed to develop, test, and deploy new products and features. The repeatability of the cloud process and procedures will allow IT teams to be agile with a consistent implementation of security controls.
Cloud deployments not only helps product innovation, but it also helps drive innovation to continuously enhance security. IT teams can easily use advanced tools like machine learning and process automation to automatically detect and respond to threats. You are therefore not only prepared for the threats that they know exist, but you also have the tools to start combatting new, unknown threats before real damage can be done using state of the art tools that will be hard to implement in the traditional on-premise hosting.
Digital transformation for innovation vs Data Silos
Data silos are the biggest current challenge in the traditional on-premise hosting models where certain admins have exclusive ownership of systems which they guard closely, preventing the organisation from globally making productive use of the data held in these systems. Cloud deployments are changing this concept of “who possesses the data where in the organisation” to “who can build and innovate the next products and solutions from the organisations global data.”
The cloud has built-in separation, governance, compliance and security measures to facilitate data access controls for specific individuals in permitted use cases. This allows creation of a singular source of truth with proper controls, this enables teams to innovate and enhance outcomes.
Historically, Financial services industry has not always been innovating their processes of deploying and managing technology. However, we have seen very recently incumbent Financial Services firms being disrupted by up and coming FinTech companies. To survive in this great disruption requires financial organisations to consciously tackle this problem.
Organisation wide Digital Transformation required
Most often than not large financial service providers bring in new IT talent on project basis but find that the Teams process innovations are not compatible across teams, which begs for a global change of priorities. A lack of process compatibility can introduce new vulnerabilities in controls and slow productivity, therefore there is a need for global uniformity of changes in favour of modern technology and cultural shifts towards innovation.
The cloud with the right controls has the tools to make data sharing and analysis quicker, easier, and safer, while still providing the inherent, deliberate ability to protect and anonymize data. The cloud is built for security with the flexibility to change as quickly as the threats. This can make the customers’ lives better and improve the ability to deliver high qulity personalized services. The time is now for financial services to rethink the fears surrounding the cloud and recognize that it is the safest bet for data governance and analysis.