Company insight
To the cloud: How banks are driving transformation
Cloud adoption is crucial to the fi nancial industry as a means of accelerating the digital transformation and adopting emerging technologies. But the cloud journey also comes with questions, such as: what should be moved fi rst? How do banks move away from their own data centres to become more agile, while at the same time ensuring security and resilience? And how can they sustainably support the cloud journey in line with the climate goals they have set? To make the most of their data, banks need the right infrastructure. Future Banking talks to Roger Süess, CEO at Green.
How important is the cloud in a modern financial institution’s business transformation journey? Roger Süess: Cloud computing is the key driver of agility and innovation, and this is especially true when it comes to banking. Here, established businesses are facing the challenge of rapidly responding to changes in customer needs, and to disruptive new market participants. While rigid infrastructures and long implementation periods haven’t managed to achieve this agility so far, the cloud is creating space for more flexibility. At the same time, it’s allowing for faster-paced innovation by providing on-demand AI, blockchain, data analytics components and more. This makes systematic cloud adoption an essential element of modern, digitalised financial institutions.
How do you see the role of IT in banks changing?
The role of IT has fundamentally changed. IT was once viewed as a provider of services and as a cost item. Then, in the early 2000s, companies started to bring the CIO back on to management boards – and technology became a business enabler. These days, this perspective goes one step further by making technology critical to a bank’s success. I would even go so far as to say that technology is the new banking.
What do banks look at in particular when building their digital platforms?
Digital platforms have a hybrid and strongly interconnected structure, with a growing proportion of it located in the
56
Banks fi nd added value in commercial data centres where lots of partners, connections and entire ecosystems come together.
Roger Süess, CEO, Green
public cloud. As the shift to the public cloud continues, so does the need to move legacy and private cloud elements away from the enterprise data centre and closer to the cloud. This is making in-house data centres superfluous, and causing data flows to switch from an inside-out model to one that is outside-in – a trend that has only been reinforced by the Covid-19 pandemic. All of a sudden, a lot of offices are left empty. Most users now connect via WAN. Commercial data centres are, therefore, becoming more important: banks find added value in places where
a lot of partners, connections and entire ecosystems come together. That is why digital platforms are being created with data-centre providers – which ideally host the cloud providers too.
You talk about adding value with ecosystems. What does that look like in practice?
Data has become a valuable raw material. At the same time, classic vertical value chains are losing their dominance as the cloud allows us to bring different technologies together. We have, therefore, created a vast ecosystem. This ecosystem includes cloud providers (hyperscalers), software companies, security providers, carriers, integrators and, of course, specialised developers and consultants. We believe this is the best way to bring best-of- breed solutions to life in a pre-integrated way, all accessible in just one place. Which offers great added value for our clients and drives forward their cloud adoption.
What are the best practices in a step-by-step approach to achieving a hybrid computing environment? Planning infrastructure strategy in life cycles has become an established practice. After all, the relocation to the cloud is similar to a journey. It starts off with first steps, usually together with a strategic partner and clarifying regulatory issues. Then, more and more suitable workloads are transferred, while legacy systems stay in place where necessary.
This gradual shift inevitably leads to in-house data centres becoming excessively large. This ties up capital
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61
