By: Francesc Pérez, @fcperez, (Business Director at Latinia)
The Economist Intelligence Unit (The EIU) has published the results of a survey of IT managers in the financial sector (sponsored by @Temenos; so, thank you guys!) about what their vision is regarding the greater or lesser urgency of going to the cloud. Does it ring you a bell?
I’d like to highlight the fact that Latin America is the area that gives the highest priority to cloud adoption. This data totally coincides with the reality of Latinia; In an important part of our current clients, @Latinia is already the next business application to jump to the cloud in 2022 (and, obviously, all the new projects are contemplated in the cloud).
Cheaper?
I was surprised that the study still mentions cost reduction as the main driver of cloud adoption, when a significant part of my daily interlocutors confirm that this reduction is not real (and that it may even be the other way around). Still, the benefits in terms of flexibility, elasticity, cost transparency, reduced complexity (standardization), agility in management / maintainability, even improvements in security and monitoring (ELK) are still very powerful reasons to go to the cloud as soon as possible.
…more efficient
That is why as a vendor we have carried out the task to evolve our monolithic products (traditional deployment on containers of applications such as Weblogic / WAS) towards a modular architecture based on microservices on orchestrators (kubernetes / Openshift) for their native deployment (Infrastructure as a code) on the market reference clouds (Azure, AWS, GCP) and native integration with their security services (encryption and credential repository, …). The result of this long process is the LIMSP © Container Class products from Latinia, that fully adapts to the business load needs in an elastic way with the best market practices based on auto-scaling and implementing the good security practices that our clients demand.
Security and Regulation
The study emphasizes that 6 out of 10 interviewees still have reservations in terms of security, privacy and compliance related to data stored in third parties. In response to these concerns, the main cloud providers have launched environments specifically oriented to financial services, covering the industry security needs.
At Latinia, we have also addressed these types of concerns by enabling hybrid deployment scenarios that allow certain sensitive customer data to remain “in the bank.” Another sort of journey, as our marketing guys usually quote.
The study also shows a very widespread opinion among those surveyed: more than 2/3 of them predict that cloud companies will become regulated institutions due to the systemic risk that cloud services represent in the hands of such a small number of companies.
The heart of the matter
But this is not enough (among us, “this was peanuts”). The complex one is the migration process of an on-premises product that is smoothly and real-time working, analyzing millions customer transactional events, providing real-time services, to the cloud.
To that end we have defined a methodology (procedures, automation, consistency of the on-premises / cloud environments during the infrastructures coexistence stage, management teams focused and dedicated on, …) necessary to carry out this stage in the safest and fastest way possible.
For my part, I am glad to have the opportunity to attend and participate in this radical process of transformation of the financial sector.
At Latinia we build real-time communication and decision software products for the financial sector, specialized in filtering and analyzing transactional events and client intelligence data.
I hope the study is of your interest. Do you agree with its results? Will be a multicloud architecture a regulator’s requirement? Will cloud providers become controlled by the industry regulators?
