Bangalore: Financial services companies as many as 43% have the plan to increase private cloud investment over the next year. This indicates that private cloud adoption is crucial to creating a modern hybrid cloud, revealed study findings.
The financial services industry findings from the third annual Enterprise Cloud Index pointed at the large scale digital transformation within the industry. And half of the study respondents said that COVID-19 pushed them to increase their investment in the hybrid cloud.
In the industry’s five-year outlook, hybrid cloud is the only IT model showing positive growth among financial company respondents. And it’s expected to increase by 39% in the five-year period.
Besides, 43% of financial services companies said to increase their investment in the private cloud over the next year. That suggested the significance of private cloud adoption in building a modern hybrid cloud.
“India’s BFSI sector is tackling a growing number of challenges as digital technologies, digital start-ups and changing customer expectations force the industry to adapt and respond,” said Balakrishnan Anantharaman, MD – Director, Sales – India, Nutanix.
“Despite these challenges, we are witnessing the sector implement various initiatives designed to take advantage of today’s digital economy,” added Anantharaman.
Recently, Future Generali India Life Insurance Company Limited (FGILI) used a combination of private and public cloud capabilities through Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS. FGILI aimed to gain the agility required for building digital solutions while storing data in compliance with regulatory requirements.
“Their technology adoption enabled the company to support 30% year-on-year growth. Nutanix remains committed to supporting India’s BFSI sector as it looks to technology for business transformation,” commented Anantharaman.
Other key findings of this year’s report include:
Financial services organisations are looking to optimize their cloud usage: For this sector, the key reasons for modernizing its IT infrastructure are gain greater control of IT resource usage (59%) and gain speed (58%). And flexibility needed (55%) to meet business requirements.
Investment in hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) shows the industry’s confidence in the private cloud: Nearly 50% of financial sector respondents have either fully deployed HCI or are in the process of doing so. But 38% report they will be deploying HCI within the next 12 to 24 months. This means the investment is directly aligned with increased private cloud adoption. Because HCI reduces the time it takes to build the software-defined, scalable infrastructure necessary to support the private cloud.
Security concerns are driving private cloud adoption: Financial services organisations (62%) ranked security, privacy and compliance issues as key concerns for running applications within public cloud solutions. But 30% of respondents were less concerned with public cloud capacity (30%) which meant that the public cloud has the capabilities to support IT infrastructures. And the security of sensitive data is non-negotiable and organisations are looking for alternative solutions.
The industry must invest in talent to support a hybrid cloud environment: More than a third of financial services respondents (36%) said they are short on skills needed to manage mixed private/public cloud environments. While 34% said they lack expertise in cloud-native technologies and containers, including Kubernetes. These issues have contributed to organisational struggles to fully adopt hybrid cloud.
The survey spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and geographies including the Americas; Europe; the Middle East and Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific and Japan. Nutanix commissioned U.K based Vanson Bourne to conduct this study, which surveyed 3,400 IT decision-makers around during the mid-2020.
The study’s main focus was to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on current and future IT infrastructure decisions. And how IT strategy and priorities might be changing because of it.