Study: Financial services firms are in the early phases of multicloud adoption

Nutanix, a hybrid multicloud computing provider, has released the financial services findings of its global 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research report, which measures enterprise progress with cloud adoption in the industry.

According to the study, fewer financial services organizations have adopted multicloud than any other industry, trailing the global average by 10%. However, adoption is expected to nearly double in the next three years, from 26% to 56%, in line with the global trend of shifting to a multicloud IT infrastructure that includes both private and public clouds.

According to ECI respondents in the financial services industry, 31% still use non-cloud-enabled three-tier datacenters as their primary IT infrastructure. They also reported the lowest public cloud adoption of all industries examined, with 59 percent using no public cloud services compared to 47 percent globally, owing to large legacy application expenditures and the industry’s highly regulated nature.

The complexity of managing across cloud boundaries remains a big hurdle for financial services firms, with 84% agreeing that success requires simpler management across multicloud infrastructures and 50% citing security concerns as a barrier to multicloud adoption.

A hybrid multicloud approach, an IT operating paradigm with various clouds, both private and public, with interoperability across them, is suitable for addressing main concerns related to security, interoperability, and data integration, according to 82 percent of respondents.

“Information security and operational resiliency remain at the forefront for financial services organizations in the Middle East. As such, they must look to hybrid multicloud solutions with integrated manageability and security, and the ability to quickly move apps among cloud infrastructures cost-effectively,” said Omar Malaeb, Regional Sales Manager, Enterprise at Nutanix. 

Respondents in the financial services poll were asked about their present cloud difficulties, how they’re now running business and mission-critical apps, and where they plan to run them in the future. The impact of the pandemic on recent, current, and future IT infrastructure decisions, as well as how IT strategy and priorities may alter as a result, were also questioned about. The following are some of the report’s key findings:

• Financial services organizations face multicloud challenges, including security (50%), integrating data across clouds (46%), and performance challenges with network overlays (43%). Given that nearly 78% cited the lack of some IT skills to meet current business demands, simplifying operations is likely to be a key focus in the year ahead. However, IT leaders are realizing that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the cloud, making hybrid multicloud ideal according to the majority of respondents (82%). This model will help address some of the key challenges of multicloud deployments by providing a unified cloud environment on which security and data governance policies can be applied uniformly.
• Application mobility is top of mind. Nearly all financial services respondents (98%) have moved one or more applications to a new IT environment over the last 12 months, likely from traditional datacenters to private clouds given the industry’s relatively low multicloud and public cloud penetration. Faster app development (43%) was most often cited as the reason for the move, followed closely by security (42%), and integrating with cloud-native services (40%). Additionally, with a large majority (83%) agreeing that moving applications to a new environment can be time-consuming and costly, it’s expected that the adoption of containers will rise in step with multicloud deployments to enable apps to run and move nearly anywhere quickly and easily. Among financial services respondents, 86% said that containers will be important to their organizations within the next year. 
• Top financial services IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months include improving security posture (54%), improving multicloud management (49%), and developing and/or implementing cloud-native technologies (47%). When asked what their organizations had done differently because of the pandemic, 70% said they had increased spending to strengthen their security posture, 64% spent more on increasing AI-based self-service automation, and 64% invested in infrastructure upgrades.