Hybrid Computing Lays the Foundation for Using Public Cloud in Financial Services

The successful journey to cloud adoption for Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) enterprises cannot be completed without addressing the complexities of core business systems. Many businesses have been able to migrate corporate support systems – such as ERP and CRM, as well as IT security and infrastructure systems to the public cloud. However, security concerns, legacy architecture, country-specific regulations, latency requirements, and transition challenges continue to keep the core system from cloud adoption.

BFSI enterprises will be unable to realize the full cloud potential until their core business systems use cloud platforms and services. Firms are looking for solutions that will allow them to continue operating out of their data centers while also providing access to the cloud-shared infrastructure made available to them in their own data centers.

To address these challenges, leading cloud service providers have launched hybrid integrated solution offerings that allow enterprises to access cloud services from their respective data centers via shared infrastructure provided by cloud providers. These allow enterprises to deploy their applications on either the cloud shared infrastructure or on their own data centers without having to rewrite the code.

Enterprises have two options: run applications directly on the cloud or run computing and storage on-premises using the same APIs. To provide a consistent experience across on-premises and cloud environments, the on-premises cloud solution is linked to the nearest cloud service provider region. Cloud infrastructure, services, and updates, like public cloud services, are managed by cloud service providers.

AWS Outposts is a leading hybrid integrated solution that provides enterprises with seamless public cloud services at their data centers. Outpost is a managed AWS service that includes computing and storage. Outpost provides enterprises with an option to be closer to the data center, as many BFSI core systems require significantly low latency, as well as an ecosystem of business applications residing on on-premise data centers.

AWS Outposts will deliver value to BFSI enterprises

Several BFSI enterprises use appliance-based databases for high performance and high availability computing. In the short and medium term, it is unlikely that these enterprises will migrate their appliance-based databases to the cloud; however, AWS provides an option to run these systems on Outposts while keeping databases on the appliances. Outpost also assists in the migration of databases from proprietary and expansive operating systems and hardware to more cost-effective and economical hardware options.

Other use cases, such as commercial off-the-shelf BFSI products that require high-end servers, can be easily moved to AWS Outposts, lowering the total cost of ownership. As a strategy, legacy monolithic core applications that require reengineering can be easily moved to AWS Outposts first and then modernized incrementally onto the public cloud.

A unified hybrid cloud system is the way forward for BFSI enterprises

AWS Outposts offer BFSI enterprises a solution that combines public and private infrastructure, consistent service APIs, and centralized management interfaces. The AWS Outpost service will be able to assist BFSI enterprises in dealing with the many expansive appliance-based core systems that run on proprietary vendor-provided operating systems and hardware that are very expensive.

AWS Outposts will allow BFSI enterprises to gradually migrate to the public cloud while maintaining core application dependencies. AWS Outpost enables a true hybrid cloud for BFSI enterprises.

Author Bio

E-mail: asim.kar@tcs.com

Asim Kar has 25+ years of overall IT experience spanning executing large-scale transformation programs and running technology organizations in BFSI in migration and reengineering space. He is currently heading the cloud technology focus group in BFSI. He leads complex transformation projects in traditional technologies in telecom, insurance, banks, and financial services programs.

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