Financial Sector Explores Nuances of Working with ISVs and SaaS Providers as Part of Cloud Strategy
New technological developments, the rise of new competitive disruptors and changing customer expectations have accelerated the pace of adoption to new value-added services.
A growing number of executives are taking a hard look at how fintech services, ISVs and SaaS resources can support this “need-for-speed” in a risk-adjusted manner.
Changing consumer expectations, unexpected competitive pressure from fintechs have elevated the need to analyze “current-state” positions in the market and map out the path to accomplishing desired “future-state” objectives.
Lane Cooper, CIO.com
New technological developments, the rise of new competitive disruptors and changing customer expectations have elevated the imports of accelerating the pace with which institutions bring new value-added services to market. A growing number of executives are taking a hard look at how fintech services, ISVs and SaaS resources can support this “need-for-speed” in a risk-adjusted manner.
This was the premise of Chatham House Rule virtual roundtable I recently co-hosted for CIO.com with Maureen Miller, Sandy Carroll and Katy O’Donohue from IBM. Below are the notes from just some of the take-aways that emerged from our executive conversation:
We discussed how recent events have accelerated the pace at which industry leaders are not just modernizing enterprise technology, but also revisiting fundamental assumptions about their business. As one participant noted, changing consumer expectations, unexpected competitive pressure from fintechs -- and the need to empower employees to make better data-driven decisions in an effective and cost-efficient manner -- have elevated the need to analyze “current-state” positions in the market and map out the path to accomplishing desired “future-state” objectives. It was in this context that many discussed a new imperative to understand the wide-array of options that have been made available by a rapidly maturing cloud computing ecosystem made up of a growing number of ISVs, public cloud SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, as well as private cloud alternatives.
Our conversation revealed that an interesting “cloud sandwich” has emerged when it comes to how cloud resources are being deployed in the financial services sector. On one side of this metaphorical morsel, several stated that major investments are being made to rapidly put in place private cloud IaaS and PaaS platforms to host important mission-critical workloads. On the other side, a similar number indicated that public SaaS offerings -- including CRM, HR, Collaboration/Email -- have been enthusiastically embraced.
There is also growing interest in third and fourth-party industry specific applications that are now available. As a result, major categories of software that have traditionally been “built” in-house are now available for purchase.
In-between these two areas of activity, important questions are still being debated about how rapidly to move major production computing operations to external IaaS and PaaS environments. Governance, risk and compliance issues loomed large on these last points, though it did seem to me that the question was more of a “when” workloads move to these public cloud platforms, as opposed to “if” they will ever move.
The economics associated with putting together a properly architected hybrid, cloud infrastructure was also discussed in some detail. Here, the point was made -- more than once -- that flexibility and agility would be a key success principle. As one participant put it, institutions must determine how cloud resources support the overarching plans for transformation, with an appreciation of rising volatility in the financial sector. This will require leaders to make rapid -- and sometimes dramatic -- enterprise-wide adjustments.
To this end enterprise-wide architectures that effectively facilitate -- and integrate -- the flow of data and applications across on-prem data centers, private cloud, public cloud and SaaS provider resources will be critical. The complexity associated with realizing this vision was recognized by all participants as being significant (understatement). This reintroduced GRC issues and the importance of having a non-siloed approach to understanding how each layer in the technology stack interacts with the others. According to one participant, this would be essential to not only successfully survive third-party audits, but also to ensuring improved enterprise-wide resilience.
Maureen and Sandy -- of IBM -- both showed how an already intricate financial-cloud environment is growing as new players enter the field to offer cloud-based innovations. This, they said, is why Big Blue has created a Cloud for Financial Services community.
For more information, please visit www.IBM.com.
Follow the links below for additional resources:
www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/MAN7QWYR