The process and journey are often as important as the product and destination. This philosophy also applies to cloud adoption. While most modern banks have initiated various stages of cloud adoption, some still operate on legacy systems to conduct core business activities, including payments, risk and compliance, and retaining customer records. This often results in increased security risks, inflated costs, underwhelming customer experiences, and a lack of flexibility. By fully utilizing the cloud and engineering a cloud adoption roadmap, banks can safeguard their investment in cloud adoption and alleviate common data challenges, including governance, security, and quality.
Cloud adoption is a multi-layered complex process that involves multiple facets of an organization and is best deployed through a strategic roadmap. To begin, conduct a detailed assessment of your current infrastructure and environment. Identify the actual current state of your bank and your potential future state. Are you currently or will you be going through a merger or acquisition? Identify and visualize the why, how, and what you plan to migrate. Your ideal roadmap should include key deliverables and objectives, tasks to complete, and tangible timelines for completion.
While developing your cloud adoption strategy, you should align your short and long-term business and organizational goals. Identify metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for a successful migration to help you decide whether a multi-cloud or single-cloud environment best fits your organizational migration needs. Also, are you planning to migrate your entire environment to the cloud or just one workload at a time? Assess whether your cloud adoption goals will support your future and long-term needs and consider accrual costs over time. Once you have conducted your cloud assessment, revisit your roadmap and make any necessary adjustments before deploying.
Data security is a significant concern throughout the cloud adoption process. Specifically, from an infrastructure standpoint: Can an external party infiltrate your database? Who can access specific data types and make changes from an application level, such as role or rule-based entitlements? Traditionally, banks with sizeable databases create large data warehouses and need help maintaining and enforcing robust data security. This process is often not transactionally bound, making it easy for data quality to suffer.
During cloud adoption and migration, prioritize setting up cloud data security best practices that maintain confidentiality, integrity, and availability to reduce the risk of cloud-based application compromise. Ensure only authorized individuals or processes can access or modify your sensitive data to minimize tampering and maintain accuracy and integrity. While safeguarding from risk, clarify that data availability remains for the authorized individuals and processes as needed.
Developing a rigorous adoption roadmap is the first step toward successful cloud adoption. Roadmapping enables companies to align their vision with short and long-term goals, make adjustments, and consider overarching objectives. Furthermore, banks and financial institutions can also benefit from prioritizing data management, governance, and security efforts to boost data quality standards and scale their business.
Cyber Hospitality deep and versatile banking industry knowledge helps us identify and comprehend our customers’ challenges to implement the right-fit solutions. We deploy a combination of data practice embedded in vertically aligned business units and a Center of Excellence (COE) to analyze our clients’ landscapes, identify their challenges, and understand their goals and objectives. From here, we develop suitable accelerators and solutions to help our customers’ engineer adoption roadmaps that safeguard and leverage their cloud vision and streamline their adoption journey.