New Cloud Frontiers for Finance: Spotlight on Security and Privacy

Sardina Systems blog
5 min readAug 4, 2021

The banks chose private cloud with complete control access, physical location, and security to balance high safety, improved scalability, and the deployment speed of applications and services.

Cloud is here

Over the last decade, cloud computing has become a crucial step in technological development. Cloud allows enterprises to create and successfully implement new business models, deliver better performance to customers, improve productivity, be more cost-efficient and more flexible in building and operating internal structures. Thus, cloud technologies enable the transformation of whole industries — from research and education to meteorology and aeronautics.

Cloud usage in the financial services industry has also increased dramatically over the last few years. More and more IT leaders, executives and board members from the financial sector focus on cloud computing and consider it a push factor for enterprise business transformation. The decision of moving to the cloud is a critical choice for financial services organizations, their confident step to the future.

There is no doubt that in 5–10 years, banks or insurance companies will completely differ from what we observe now. To be ready for the upcoming inevitable changes, financial institutions need to start implementing the revolutionary business models and innovative technologies today to correspond to sovereignty and security data requirements and meet tomorrow’s consumer expectations.

In response to market demands: faster time to market service, tailored solutions, security, cost reduction and efficiency, financial institutions are adopting the cloud to take advantage of these benefits. Today the choice of banks, insurance, and investment companies is mainly in favor of the private cloud rather than the public. According to the annual Enterprise Cloud Index Report, this tendency is only going to increase since 43% of financial services companies plan to boost their investment in the private cloud over the next few years.

Benefits of Privacy

Data protection and privacy are the number one reasons why financial institutions prefer private cloud infrastructure. The extreme security level of the private cloud environment, the constant track recording, and AI-enabled services significantly enhance financial institutions’ IT infrastructure. All the data in the environment is your own, and you have complete control and responsibility for the digital and physical access.

Regarding the private cloud location, there are two options. Organizations can place it inside its physical perimeter, on-premises and be responsible for all the established controls and operations. The second option is a hosted private cloud located externally with the help of a third-party provider. Besides, you can even locate the cloud isolating it from the Internet, and your staff will still be able to access it in case of extraordinary circumstances like cyberattacks or Internet disruption. Within a private cloud environment, the business has complete control and visibility over its security architecture and can customize it to fit its specific needs.

Conversely, in public clouds, the responsibility is shared between the several levels of cloud providers and a client. Organizations should accept the security risks of public or hybrid clouds and always stay ready to solve the possible issues with sovereignty or data protection.

The private cloud is a great ally to reduce costs of operating the financial workload. The optimization of everyday working routine through automation of iterative operations leads to better and faster data performance and decreases the risks of human factors. Smooth integration between business units, quick data sharing and innovative cloud tools speed up the process for decision-makers and customers to satisfy their needs.

The initial cost for building a private cloud is certainly not small, but if you aim to grow your business long-term, then private cloud is definitely the right direction. It is primarily believed that low cost is a benefit of the public cloud, but once you begin the extensive growth, so does your bill from the public provider. Due to a variety of hidden costs such as network bandwidth, the fast-growing company faces the upside of the promotional offer from well-known public cloud providers. That’s why it’s in your best interest to think ahead and make the right decision at the beginning of your cloud journey because this kind of choice could be crucial for the company’s future.

Among the other important value sources of private cloud are the opportunities for driving business innovations, preventing problems due to building reliable, resilient operations, complete independence in scaling the business and cost control.

Soft Impact upon the Cloud

By choosing a highly efficient cloud management software, your investments eventually result in extra security, cloud private environment integrity and data protection. It affects not only the IT department workload but all the business processes of financial institutions. AI-enabled automatization and zero-downtime operations secure stable systems that require less time and human resources to be involved.

Innovative platform-as-a-service helps banks increase revenue generation and consumer insights, deliver highly demanded products efficiently and quickly, save costs, and monetize data assets. Combining the massive data volumes from all the departments and branches in the private cloud, the enterprise can apply advanced tools for integrated analytics, synchronize the workloads and achieve much better data performance.

At Sardina, we have created FishOS that allows you to create an ultra-reliable platform. FishOS brings a revolutionary change in infrastructure for traditional enterprise workload and next-gen applications, with data security and protection, zero‐click operations, and AI-enabled operational simplicity through automation. Thanks to FishOS industry-first seamless zero downtime upgrade, we make sure you dedicate your time to important matters of your business. Ultimately, FishOS deployment takes a couple of hours, and the cloud platform can perfectly integrate with your existing structure. However, it is essential to remember that each private cloud’s integrity is entirely reliant on the team’s skills, competencies, and expertise in managing the design, procurement, implementation, and operation of the environment.

Cloud adoption is an extremely popular macro trend for many industries. In finance, cloud computing is crucial for successful data management and faster service, connecting financial, insurance, and investment institutions with customers. While clients’ data privacy and security is the priority for the institutions, the private cloud emerges as the best option to protect this sensitive information and at the same time lets the company compete within the fast-evolving fintech sector.

Thus, the private cloud solution in banking can be the ideal decision as long as it is supported by the right technology, security skills, and expertise of the professional team.

Tags: sardina systems, privatecloud, fishos, banking, finance, insurance, financial sector, finance cloud

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Sardina Systems blog

A cloud software vendor building on OpenStack & Kubernetes with Zero-Downtime Operations, scalable, no lock-in, and efficient to any enterprise.