The cloud isn’t quite popular in the financial sector, as it is in other industries. The financial sector deals with highly sensitive and valuable data and because of certain misconceptions about the cloud being unsecure in nature, IT leaders have been very skeptical in adopting cloud technology. But, things are changing and the financial industry is beginning to realize the improvements in operations offered by the cloud. Thus, many IT decision makers in the industry have started to “make the move”. But, there’s one simple question that pops-up when it comes to adopting the cloud – What are banks and insurance companies using the cloud for?
In this article, we have discussed the top 5 ways financial sector can leverage cloud:
Back-office systems: Hosting back-office systems in the cloud eliminates the need to deal with hardware procurement and maintenance, power and cooling, and staff utilization for regular maintenance activities. Although back-office systems are critical for any financial organization, it is an easy way to test the working of the cloud without feeling like a customer-facing system being put to risk. HR / Payroll / Time Tracking Applications, CRM, Office 365 and Digital workloads (website, email, etc.) are some of the most common applications being moved to the cloud.
Customer-facing applications: With the constant rise in customer portals and mobile applications, banks and insurance companies have been migrating their customer-facing applications to the cloud. Using the cloud reduces the need to worry about scalability and agility as compared to using the in-house management which is expensive and faces challenges in accommodating traffic fluctuations.
Policy-management systems: The insurance companies have started accepting cloud as the practical solution to host their insurance policy management systems. These hold critical customer information like policies, new claims, background checks, etc. And, since the supporting infrastructure needs to be compliant to store such information, HIPAA and PCI-compliant clouds are an ideal choice for insurance organizations.
Uptime and Disaster Recovery (DR): The use of customer portals and mobile applications also demand the banks and other financial organizations to be online and in service 24×7. The legacy disaster recovery solutions are not only slow and expensive but also hardware intensive for modern day financial institutions. By adopting cloud DR solutions, financial institutions can follow compliance requirements and reduce downtime at a fraction of the cost of their legacy DR solutions.
Business Intelligence and Analytics: Digitalization of banking processes has led to the generation of massive amounts of customer data. Companies know that this data can be mined to get meaningful insights in real-time and has to be stored somewhere. The cloud enables data storage in HIPAA and PCI-compliant manner and ensures that the sensitive information collected by banks and insurance companies is absolutely secure and available. Cloud is also scalable and eliminates the problem of quickly changing resource requirements for business analytics.
Identifying the right application, specific to the finance industry, can put a whole lot of obligations on the internal teams of an organization. Thus, working with a reputed service provider is a worthwhile solution.
At Sysfore, we have worked with thousands of enterprises of all sizes helping them identify business breakthroughs that the Cloud can enable. We examine your business requirements holistically and help you migrate to Cloud to increase business effectiveness.
If you have questions about how you can leverage the cloud for your organization, get in touch with our experts by writing to us at info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-41105555.