Banking on cloud

Despite initial fears over cloud computing, the financial sector is warming to the idea of migrating applications from a physical environment to a virtual one. It’s no surprise to see that the popularity of cloud is rising amongst the industry, especially with the likes of Barclays announcing that they have cut IT expenses by 90% as a result of cloud computing.

In a time where the industry is desperately trying to reinvent its reputation and restore trust amongst customers, slashing unnecessary IT cost is an important proof of sensible business practises. Cost-cutting, however, isn’t the only thing steering bankers towards virtualisation and cloud computing. There’s also the advantage of business continuity, agility, as well as keeping up with the latest technology trends.

As the positives shine through, the risks that come with migrating business-critical applications start to hide behind the clouds. It’s important to remember that once applications have moved over to the cloud, achieving visibility and measuring performance (two essential capabilities) is hard to achieve in a virtualised environment, if you haven’t invested in the right tools.

Now that cloud adoption is taking off across banking institutions, these aspects cannot be ignored. Lack of visibility blinds the IT department and prevents opportunities for improvement. Critically, without full visibility over what’s happening in the cloud the IT manager cannot prevent or intercept problems before they happen – or before they affect customers.

In a sector that is at far higher risk than any other, it’s imperative that banks who are migrating or have migrated applications to the cloud invest in intelligent IT operations that give their IT teams the ability to see and fix problems fast. Otherwise, these issues can affect customers, impacting revenue and any chance of restoring trust and rebuilding reputation, will be lost.