Adilson Pereira, Regional Sales Director for the Financial Market, Dynatrace, discusses the recent acceleration and transformation in the IT departments of banks and insurers regarding the cloud. According to him, the complexity of the process increases and makes it necessary for IT teams to adopt a more sustainable approach to achieve positive results.
For most industries, the first concerns about moving data to the cloud started years ago. As a result, we have seen a widespread shift to multi-cloud architectures in the last decade as organizations have learned to deal with this technology in search of greater agility to keep up with both the growing expectations of customers and the demands of their rapidly changing markets.
However, for highly regulated financial services companies, the reality is different. Only recently have the benefits of the cloud begun to outweigh the security and integrity arguments used to keep many of their operations’ workloads in on-premises environments. Only very recently, we have been able to track an accelerating shift in the IT departments of banks and insurance companies to the cloud.
Today, given the variety of services in the market, most of these organizations use more than one platform and have workloads distributed across multiple environments. These multi-cloud strategies with multiple clouds combined provide the agility and scalability that finance sector companies need to stay ahead, innovate more quickly and continuously optimize.
While it is true that choosing multiple platforms offers greater flexibility to financial organizations, it is also a fact that each cloud implemented in a multi-cloud environment equally increases complexity and adds a new source of data to monitor. In other words, this means more work for IT teams to deal with infrastructure management.
Not by chance, numbers from a recent independent survey conducted by Dynatrace show that IT specialists in financial organizations spend almost half of their time (42%) on manual and routine tasks dedicated only to keeping the infrastructure running.
In this context, IT teams must have a more sustainable approach to managing environments and networks, freeing up professionals’ time and energy. In this case, time and energy can be reinvested in driving Digital Transformation and delivering the high-quality, safe and efficient experiences that customers want.
Indeed, having more time available for innovation is essential. Financial institutions should keep our money safe and accessible, and that also requires them to sustain and develop a constant flow of innovations.
Whether customers are checking their account balances or transactions, requesting a loan or transferring money between accounts, users expect a seamless digital experience. Otherwise, they may switch to the competition.
To achieve this level, IT teams in these financial institutions must manage application performance effectively. They need intelligent and end-to-end observability in their multi-cloud environment. Unfortunately, this visibility is not easy to achieve, as blind spots keep emerging as the infrastructure becomes more complex.
Each new cloud platform comes with its own native monitoring solution, such as Amazon CloudWatch or Azure Monitor, which adds another data source that IT teams must track. These teams gradually found themselves with many tools to be overlaid on top of traditional monitoring solutions to track activity across the entire IT infrastructure.
Our research indicates that, on average, financial institutions rely on seven different monitoring solutions to manage multi-cloud environments. As a result, IT departments are flooded with data and, consequently, forced to spend more and more time manually gathering insights from different dashboards to keep operations efficient and identify issues in their digital services. The tension of this task reduces the time they have to drive innovation and create business value.
In this scenario, traditional monitoring approaches are no longer efficient. After all, financial services institutions need to empower their IT areas with a better approach to infrastructure monitoring. By leveraging AIOps, teams can automate as many infrastructures management tasks as possible.
This option, in turn, eliminates blind spots by continuously discovering and instrumenting multi-cloud infrastructure as the environment itself changes. As a result, employees can maintain end-to-end observability without investing more time and effort in manual monitoring processes.
AIOps can also enable teams to automatically triage notifications indicating a potential disruption in the digital experience and show the precise insights needed to resolve issues before they affect users and customers.
With an AIOps approach, teams can understand the cause of any problem in their multi-cloud infrastructure and prioritize them based on their expected impact on the business. It allows sector employees to solve the most critical issues first and focus efforts on tasks that accelerate the delivery of reliable, innovative and high-quality financial services experiences.
Financial institutions face fierce competition. Fintechs born in the digital world can innovate fast because they do not have the complexity of managing a legacy on-premises environment alongside modern cloud platforms.
More established banks and insurers have adopted multi-cloud infrastructure to ensure the agility needed to drive innovation. Those who do not keep up will be forgotten. However, as financial institutions keep their transition to multi-cloud architecture, it is essential to ensure that the infrastructure runs smoothly.
Creating continuous digital services and customer satisfaction are the key strategic objectives of any organization. Adopting infrastructure monitoring strategies that leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation can help organizations achieve these objectives.
Reducing the burden of manual tasks on IT teams will also allow them to focus their time and effort on projects that accelerate Digital Transformation, generate better business results and provide amazing experiences.