Making Connectivity A Key Part of Cloud Strategy for Finance

By Eric Troyer, CMO at Megaport

Finance organisations across the board are facing unprecedented disruption, with new technology entering the industry and consumer demands constantly evolving. Firms are trying to adapt to the rise of digital-first and the insatiable hunger of customers for increased speed and new types of services.

Leaders in the finance industry see cloud adoption as vital for multiple reasons. For example, they can leverage the cloud to speed up processing, eliminate data silos, surface deeper insights, and lower infrastructure and operating costs. As Peter Williams, global head of financial services technology, at Amazon Web Services, argues: “Taking advantage of virtually unlimited data storage and compute power to mine their core data allows financial institutions to make better trading, investment, and policy underwriting decisions. Analysing patterns across exabytes of data used to require significant investment and time, but cloud services that automate machine learning (ML) algorithms are improving how quickly organisations can innovate for their customers.”

Many financial organisations have long realised the importance of the cloud, however adoption has picked up steam in the last 12 months, and this only looks to be accelerating. Eighty-four per cent of fintechs, 82 per cent of corporate banks, 74 per cent of retail banks and 79 per cent of intermediaries globally plan to move mission-critical workloads into public cloud infrastructure by the end of this year, according to Ovum and ACI Worldwide.

It isn’t necessarily surprising that the finance industry is now fully embracing the cloud and understanding the innovative benefits it provides, but are they taking a step back to make sure the infrastructure is in place to support these goals? Are they thinking about how to actually make the cloud work for them?

Connecting the tightly-knit financial services ecosystems

The global professional services firm EY argues, “The benefits of cloud technology can’t be contested. It’s less expensive, easier to use, and in many ways, safer than private data centres. In addition to its benefits, cloud technology helps solve some of the most pressing concerns of financial institutions.” It goes without saying that the cloud is going to play a vital role in how the finance sector develops for years to come. However, that comes with pressure to get it right now.

For example, a stockbroker may use data to influence their decisions to purchase or sell, but they need to have access to this information quickly, then marry it with intelligence on their customer (their appetite for risk, etc.), and then be able to seamlessly make the purchase or sale. Having access to the data and partners that solves just one part of this equation isn’t helpful; it all has to be linked up.

This all requires speed, but, more importantly, it relies on a tightknit ecosystem for its success. Therefore, high performing cloud connectivity must be at the heart of any cloud strategy for finance organisations, so that they can tie these ecosystems together and move data quickly and securely. Despite this being a critical ingredient to success, many businesses have focused on what cloud service provider they will use or what application they want to run without considering how they will actually connect it all together.

While many CTOs focus on their cloud strategy, what really needs to be refined is their connectivity strategy.

Cloud connectivity — elastic is fantastic

When it comes to networks and connectivity, many finance organisations would have traditionally utilised a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network. However, when private MPLS networks were first deployed, accessing cloud providers may not have been top of mind. Today, this is a critical factor in the deployment.

To support the enterprise costs of deploying a large-scale MPLS network, an organisation most likely entered into a long-term contract, not necessarily planning for how cloud could affect that decision in the future and the challenges of being locked into their existing topology. Adding multiple clouds and managing connectivity on an existing MPLS platform is typically slow, costly, and complex. This is the last thing financial organisations want when trying to boost speed and flexibility.

This is where Software Defined Networks (SDN) and virtual routing services come into their own. They can solve the cloud connectivity problem without requiring financial organisations to rip and replace MPLS networks and manage the expense that comes with that.

Working with an SDN to connect to the cloud helps reduce complexity of IT infrastructure and costs. More importantly, for financial services, SDN can reduce downtime as it helps to virtualise most of the physical networking devices, making it easy to perform an upgrade for one piece rather than needing to do it for several devices.

Virtual routing services, meanwhile, are a great option to solve the complexities and costs that come with connecting an MPLS network to the public cloud. Essentially, it is a way of easily and virtually routing an existing MPLS network to the cloud via an SDN.

Another major consideration for IT leaders is whether their organisation can quickly adapt to peaks and troughs in demand. Increasing bandwidth when needed can be critical to quickly adapting to changes in the stock market, for example. Therefore, financial organisations should ensure that connectivity to the cloud is elastic —  where bandwidth can be turned up or down in an instant This flexibility ensures that core business operations don’t fall down if there are peaks in demand and, equally as important, IT leaders are not paying for unused bandwidth that they don’t need.

Architecting a future-proof cloud infrastructure

There is no question that cloud technology will continue to change the way financial organisations operate. The task for CTOs now is to make sure they can easily get to the cloud, and they can quickly connect the tight-knit ecosystems they rely upon for success. The question CTOs at finance organisations should be asking themselves, therefore, is not what innovation can the cloud drive, but rather how do I make the most of it?  They can expect that connectivity will be a big part of the answer.