Greg Holmes is AVP of Solutions at Apptio – an IBM company. We sat down with him to explore how better cloud management can help the fintech and financial services sector regain control over growing costs, negate financial risk and support organisations in becoming more resilient against cyber threats.
What is the most important element of a cloud management strategy and how can businesses create a plan which reduces financial risk?
From my daily conversations with cloud customers, I know that many run into unexpected costs during the process of creating and maintaining a cloud infrastructure, so getting a clear view over cloud costs is pivotal in minimising financial risks for businesses.
One of the most important steps here involves creating a robust cloud cost management strategy. For many organisations, Cloud turns technology into an operational cost rather than a capital investment, which ensures the business can be more agile. The process supports the allocation of costs back to the teams responsible to ensure accountability, and it aligns costs to the business product and services which are generating revenue. It also helps manage and easily connect workloads if there are cost, security and architectural issues to address.
Businesses should also look to implement tools that proactively alert teams when they encounter unexpected costs or out of control spend, plus any unallocated costs. This helps different teams create good habits for regularly accessing tech spend and removing any unnecessary costs, and this constant process of renewal will help eliminate overspending and identify areas for streamlining.
Can you provide an overview explaining why FS organisations are struggling to maintain and integrate cloud in a cost-efficient way?
Firstly, it’s important that we understand how the financial services sector has approached the journey of digitisation. The industry has been at the forefront of technological innovation for many years, including cloud adoption, and businesses have seen several key benefits. Cloud infrastructure has given financial services companies more choice and made their tech teams more agile, and cloud has opened the door to new technologies, including supporting the implementation of AI, with no capital investment.
However, businesses can face different hurdles. For example, when moving to the cloud, it can take time to re-configure and optimise infrastructure to run on the cloud, which can result in lengthy delays. The need to upskill employees to use the new systems only exacerbates this problem.
Another significant challenge is the rush to migrate away from old hosting arrangements coupled with risk aversion. Often, organisations simply “port” over systems without changing their configuration to take advantage of the elastic nature of the cloud, provisioning for long term needs, not current usage. All these factors can result in organisations overlooking the expense of shifting between technologies, whether it is rearchitecting or getting engineers to review the change and result in overspending becoming the norm.
Aside from helping businesses be more aware of costs, could you explain how better cloud management can strengthen defences against cyber threats?
This is a part of cloud management that organisations sometimes overlook, as security operations often function separately to the rest of the IT department. But cross communication in the financial services industry is essential to maximising protection, as it is one of the most targeted sectors for cyberattacks in the UK. In fact, recent IBM data revealed it saw the costliest breaches across industries, with the average cost reaching over £6 million. This is because threat actors can gain access to banking and other personal information which they can hold for ransom or sell on the dark web.
By improving cloud management, business leaders can strengthen their defences against cyberthreats in several ways. Firstly, a thorough strategy can bolster data protection by incorporating more encryption to keep personal data secure. Cloud management can also move security and hosting responsibilities to a third-party and to more modern purpose built technology, which ensures it’s not maintained in-house and is managed elsewhere. External vendors will most likely have more available expertise, meaning these teams are better positioned to protect essential assets. Equally, this process can improve data locations to meet more rigid data sovereignty rules and enable multi-factor authentication, which acts as a deterrent but also reduces the ability of internal threats.
What steps should FS organisations take to future proof operations?
Many organisations are leveraging a public, private or hybrid cloud, so it’s critical that financial services leaders look to utilise solutions which can support businesses on this journey of digitisation.
These offer better visibility over outgoings which can reduce the possibility of overspending or unexpected results. These technologies also allow companies to easily recognise elements that they need to change and make adjustments in line with how each part of the organisation is performing. This is particularly important as any successful cloud journey will require tweaks along the way to ensure it is continuously meeting changing business objectives.
Solutions can also allow for shorter timeframes for investments to be successful, which means organisations can adopt technologies like AI at a much faster rate.
- Fintech & Insurtech
- Infrastructure & Cloud
