The banking industry has made a strong start in the move toward cloud platform adoption to push forward its digitalization. Experts from around the world, such as Dominic Stewart, Cloud Engineering Senior Director at Oracle UK, are celebrating this strategic decision by some financial institutions and point to the many advantages of migrating to a cloud platform, such as its scalability, the ability to manage big data in real-time, as well as a high level of IT security. As Stewart explains, “cloud computing has matured and is therefore more secure for companies”.
Latinia, an expert in the development of real-time decision-making and communication software products for the financial sector, is also clearly committed to this technology. “We are convinced of the potential of cloud computing for financial institutions to remain competitive with digital native segments, to differentiate themselves from the competition and generate new growth opportunities. This is why we encourage our customers to tackle this process as a key part of their corporate strategy,” affirms Marc Alcón, CEO of Latinia.
What are the benefits of migrating to a cloud platform?
Latinia, over the last few years, has successfully carried out the migration of on-premises infrastructure to a cloud environment for several clients. As Eduardo Pardo, Latinia’s Pre-Sales Engineer, explains, “we accompany the client through every phase of the project: design, implementation and follow-up, so that the deployment of the cloud platform is a success and the client can start enjoying the advantages of this technology as soon as possible, as well as the many functions of our products”.
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of cloud platform adoption for banking, according to Eduardo Pardo at Latinia:
- Much more efficient management of resources, as the administration and availability of the infrastructure and services of the cloud platform is in the hands of the owner themselves.
- Reduced licensing costs for required third-party products, since, unlike an on-premises platform, it is possible to rely on open source products to run it.
- The flexibility of horizontal and/or vertical growth of a cloud platform allows the required infrastructure to be dynamically adapted to the real circumstances and needs of the business.
- Unlike an on-premise environment, the availability of the cloud platform is considered at different levels, which is guaranteed by the redundancy of nodes. In other words, in a cloud environment, the orchestrator ensures the execution of each microservice, being able to make its processes redundant or restart them if they are out of healthy metrics. At the level of infrastructure and services delivered, these can be deployed redundantly in one provider region or in different regions
- A more simplified and nearly automatic platform installation process compared to on-premises modes. The platform is deployed in an unattended manner (‘Infrastructure as a Code’, IaC) in a space hosted by the cloud provider, which is owned by the customer (tenant) in PaaS mode. In this way, the resources made available by the Cloud provider in SaaS mode are used in terms of infrastructure (machines), storage space (types of file system required) and different services required by the platform such as the database, balancers, kubernetes…
- Upgrades or extensions to any of the platform’s modules are managed nearly automatically, which saves time and significantly reduces risk.
- Constant monitoring of the health of microservices by the orchestrator, which increases their availability. The provider delivers a series of control panels (‘Dashboards’) that allow for monitoring and programming of alerts associated with different infrastructure metrics such as file system sizes, queue depths, memory and CPU usage, DDBB usage, etc. It is also possible to integrate with standard platforms such as ELK for monitoring traffic and events via streaming.
