Why the financial services industry is rapidly embracing hybrid cloud

Nutanix revealed that the financial services Industry, FSI, outpacing other industries in the adoption of hybrid cloud, with the deployment of hybrid cloud reaching 21% penetration today, compared with the global average of 18.5%.

The findings were announced in the enterprise cloud leader's Enterprise Cloud Index Report for the financial services sector, measuring financial firms' plans for adopting private, public and hybrid clouds.

Financial services firms today are facing mounting competitive pressure to streamline operations while delivering a differentiated experience to their customers, including leveraging new technologies such as blockchain.

This FinTech revolution, combined with the growing burdens of regulatory compliance, data privacy, and security issues are pushing CIOs to fundamentally transform the technological underpinnings of their institutions. The report reveals exactly how the financial services industry is embracing the capabilities of cloud computing to address these needs.

It is also abundantly clear from the survey results that many financial organisations are still struggling with modernising their outdated legacy IT architectures and processes, resulting in inefficient operations and potential vulnerability in regards to data breaches.

In fact, the report revealed financial services run more traditional data centers than other industries, with 46% penetration. Despite their progressiveness on the hybrid cloud front, financial organisations have lower usage levels of private clouds than any other industry, at 29% penetration compared to the average of 33%.

Like other industries, the financial services sector cites security and compliance as the top factor in deciding where to run its workloads. Nearly all respondents also indicated that performance, management, and TCO are critical factors in the decision.

However, more than 25% cited these same factors as challenges with adopting public cloud. In other words, as is often the case with new IT solutions, the most important criteria are also the most difficult to achieve.

This could account for part of the disparity between the high desire to adopt hybrid cloud and today's relatively low hybrid cloud penetration levels of just 21% in the financial services sector.

The bullish outlook for hybrid cloud adoption globally and across industries is reflective of an IT landscape growing increasingly automated and flexible enough that enterprises have the choice to buy, build, or rent their IT infrastructure resources based on fast transforming application requirements.