A Game of Confidence!

As you know…Financial Services is a “Game of Confidence.” First Security with digital experience because...

the public and shareholders expect solid controls and in-depth testing while realizing the return on investment (ROI) and understanding key considerations for robust and secure digital acceleration.

Effort-based ROI: All about Business Value & effort it takes

The typical business benefits are:

1. Cost savings - Increased productivity in application and infrastructure costs – change the equation from CapEx to OpEx
2. Digital Transformation – Predict customer needs and react to create the best customer experience
3. Operational de-risking ( AKA – Security to build confidence) – Reduce downtime potential with resiliency and redundancy; De-risk critical applications by remediating/refactoring and then migrating to the cloud
4. De-risk the supply chain – Innovate with FinTechs while adhering to auditors' standards for security controls.
5. Generating benefit + revenue – Be more efficient and enable strategic capabilities with the cloud. Create agility to speed to market.

While understanding ROI – Have a growth mindset to decide.

1. Is this an efficiency-focused effort? Which means focusing on back-office processes to optimize existing value streams.
2. Is this growth-focused? This means creating a new front-office experience by unlocking new value streams.
3. Can I keep or consolidate or refactor or retire?
4. Can I extend to multi-cloud?

Once you have decided on the workloads based on the growth mindset and ROI,

 Then… 

Cost-based ROI – All about business value based on Total cost of Ownership ( TCO)

Understand the target cloud overview and collect the existing on-premise or cloud data overview with the information on the cost of operating the current data center, including capital costs over the equipment lifespan, labor costs, and any other maintenance and operational costs, from licenses and software to spare parts. Then estimate the cloud infrastructure costs while considering ongoing fees, labor and training costs, ongoing integration and testing of apps, security, and compliance. And understand the migration costs, including labor & testing.

Then, calculate the total cost of ownership as is and to be. Finally, make sure to add the quantified value proposition based on co-selling and decreased auditory activities to accelerate time to revenue to make decisions, along with the cloud value proposition of being able to reduce CapX, agility, and innovation.

 Oh. Don’t forget to quantify the alleviated Risk.

 Use the risk quantification method to calculate the risk avoidance benefits to future-proof the applications to create a client experience.

Check and double-check: Trust but Verify!

Avoid biases and blind spots that can affect decision-making:

• Overconfidence blind spot: Don't be too confident in understanding costs and project timelines. According to the Flexera survey, on average, cloud spending is 18% over the budget.
• Recency blind spot: Wow by the latest technology, but decide on ROI
• Confirmation blind spot: Make sure to perform objective reviews instead of notions and false beliefs.
• Refactoring and reworking blind spot: Know what it takes from a time and money perspective to run in the cloud.
• Talent reskilling blind spot: Do we have the right talent? Are we spending enough to retrain or maintain multiple ops teams?
• Operational costs blind spot: Did we factor every operating cost throughout the client's journey of using workload? (Ex: Data Egress charges)

 Now Security…

Security and fraud risk concerns increased with borderless ecosystem interactions while clients wanted a digital experience. How can we balance? Knock the low-hanging fruit first to create the customer experience.

Picture worth 1000 words!

Have a safe Cloud Journey!