At this year’s Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, research vice president and agenda manager Bob Gill from the advisory firm suggested that banks in need of improving customer experience must look at what the big tech players are doing.
Behemoths like Google and Amazon have what Gill referred to as a “pre-vetted set of patterns” so financial institutions could in theory copy how data is processed in their network and update their systems to increase customer intimacy.
Gill highlighted that while agility is a top priority for most software developers, they are burdened with a conundrum when a diverse range of products are presented to them, as well as having to keep up with innovation.
He said that developers will have to “react fast” and “deploy external services” just so “the lights stay on”. Gill continued: “You can’t put the genie back into the bottle, because it is a question of time.”
Software developers will have to take on a new role in infrastructure operations, rather than outsourcing to consultancies or third parties, Gill explained. David Cappuccio, Gartner’s distinguished VP analyst, added that the infrastructure of today is not enough to support tomorrow.
The key message of the event was that “the future of infrastructure is everywhere” and it is out of our hands. “The future may radically change and there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but it is not a train coming towards you,” Cappuccio said.
The train metaphor continued when senior director analyst Ross Winser said that application development offers an “opportunity to jump on the express train of change” to satisfy customer needs and “build a rich tapestry of functionality using APIs.”
Gartner research revealed that by 2025, 70% of organisations not adopting a service/product orientation will be unable to support their business so it is evermore important to have a well-aligned, well-thought out infrastructure, Winser suggested.
In addition to this, by 2022 50% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data centre of the cloud, which further reinforced the need for banks and financial institutions to start making the most of edge computing.
However, as Philip Dawson, VP analyst pointed out, while bandwidth is getting better with the introduction of 5G, for example, latency is not and developers still have to engineer delay into applications.
Edge computing in Europe also presents a problem with concerns around privacy and protecting data with the recent implementation of GDPR.