For Banking Industry, Cloud Migration a Question of When, Not If

It’s not a question of if, but when, financial services will migrate to the cloud.

Early Warning Services Chief Technology Officer Milind Nagnur told PYMNTS in an interview that “every financial institution (FI) is somewhere or other on the spectrum of transitioning to the cloud.”

He said there’s no real resistance to doing so as banks realize that they need to deliver optimal customer experiences across digital and mobile applications with real-time responses. Content must be ready and relevant to the end-user, and at the same time, the FI must be careful not to sacrifice trust and security.

The cloud allows FIs to embrace the latest and greatest tech at any given point in time — no matter if it’s related to machine learning, quantum computing or the metaverse, he said.

“The FI does not have to focus time, money and energy on building operating infrastructure,” said Nagnur, who added that “this is what the cloud provides through Infrastructure-as-a-Service.”

Early Warning’s operations will be 100% on the cloud by early 2025, he said.

See also: Financial Services Firms Reap Gains of Being Digital-First Trailblazers

Trust, Security and Containers

Nagnur said the cloud lets banks embed trust and security — hallmarks of financial services — into their architecture. Multiple data centers with multi-region architecture, coupled with the ability to “fail over” quickly and seamlessly upgrade and patch networks, provide strong lines of defense.

We’re well past the age where mainframes served as the ultimate bastions of technology, or where “tiers” of apps and databases were separate.

Nagnur pointed specifically to containerization — where microservices and software shift seamlessly between computing environments — as a technological advance that helps FIs move quickly and in a more automated way when tackling bugs, program defects or rolling out new mobile features (thus shortening development cycles).

Cloud technology, he added, also improves service availability to four-nine and five-nine uptime, which means there are only minutes of outages as measured annually.

As he told PYMNTS, when operations are containerized across multiple regions, “This gives you scale and flexibility and a response time that is required for running a successful digital business.”

That’s because the containers can be refreshed automatically — and quickly. By working in agile teams, developers can shorten cycle times further.

“The end user facing the mobile applications can update every week or even more often,” he said. “So, you [can] have a multi-tier and multi-speed architecture that is necessary for today’s financial services.”

Looking ahead, he said that progress would only accelerate on the cloud in the next few years because consumer demand for digital banking services is on the rise.

As Nagnur told PYMNTS, “If we spend time getting the architecture design right, we can still keep the trust, which is the focal center of any business in financial services, intact. But at the same time, we can give a modern experience to users.”

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