As financial institutions move to cloud, they need more intelligent monitoring to manage a complex IT topology.
- The use of cloud technology by financial institutions is well established, but, while cloud technology has been carefully rolled out by them, typically this has been done in a piecemeal rather than enterprise-level approach.
- In most cases the enterprise IT topology is increasingly complex, incorporating on-premises monolithic and container-based applications, virtual machines and cloud-based computing in various forms. The lack of a single comprehensive view of all these deployments raises the possibility of security breaches, compliance violations, productivity loss, inefficiencies, slowed enterprise enhancement and client churn.
- As cloud computing will inevitably be more widely and comprehensively used in the future, financial institutions need to think about using more intelligent monitoring for visibility across the complexity of their entire enterprise IT topology.
Cloud strategies in banks are often owned by Information Security (InfoSec) teams and, therefore, address mainly InfoSec issues, rather than business strategy. The question hovering over this is why haven’t business strategists seized the opportunity to implement business-driven cloud strategies? The answer is, well, cloudy. Sitting between the business and InfoSec teams are platform and application teams with a good understanding of the complexities of a strategic large-scale deployment to the cloud. They have no uniform voice on whether large-scale cloud deployments would be a good thing in general or not.
Putting future strategies aside for a moment, and focusing on the reality of enterprises today, most developers agree that large monolithic applications should be replaced (at some point). A significant majority of banks have addressed some of the low-hanging fruit and have taken mostly less latency-sensitive, non-critical services into the cloud. Indeed, banks have already implemented a host of IT ‘as-a-Service’ offerings in the cloud. Instead of making the enterprise IT cleaner and more streamlined, it has typically become more complex. This complexity means that many financial firms are failing to obtain a clear and comprehensive view of their entire IT enterprise.
