Do you think the cloud is already a massive part of the technological makeup of the financial institution’s infrastructure? Hold on to your hat; it’s about to get even busier with more cloud adoption hitting the sector like never before.
Not surprisingly, the cloud will continue to be the centerpiece for new digital experiences, forecasted by Gartner to swipe $474 billion from the pocketbooks of organizations around the globe.1
Revenue rooted in the cloud is expected to surpass that of non-cloud revenue in the next few years, with 85% of organizations embracing a cloud-first principle and over 95% of new digital workloads deployed on cloud-native platforms by 2025.2
While it’s the analysts’ job to figure out how and where money is being spent, IT organizations’ job is to ensure that these investments are allocated to the right initiatives and projects, those that drive the organization toward the institution’s business objectives. It’s not enough to tie the tech investments to a product release, a data center migration, or another transformation project milestone.
We must remember that these technology investments—and the projects that bring them into the operational fold—are just a means to the end. Sadly, many IT leaders often forget about the future; what is it, and when? A view of what the organization is trying to accomplish must remain top of mind and be discussed more often at the executive level. This especially holds for those IT leaders responsible for bringing significant change to the world of financial services – both for their customers and for the employees and partners that serve them.
To answer the “what is it?” question, let’s turn to identify what modern, forward-thinking FinServ organizations—and their leaders—are looking to accomplish. It’s possible you also find two significant trends that have emerged in conversation amongst your executive leadership team: being future-fit and becoming environmentally sustainable.
Technology is central to an organization’s success (or failure) in achieving its long-term objectives. This is evident in the amount of money spent now and into the foreseeable future. It’s not just about the features that the technology brings to the table, mind you.
Technology must also be:
- flexible to either fit or create the business infrastructure and workflows to support the operational requirements necessary to achieve those objectives.
- deployable, configurable, securable, maintainable, monitorable, and tunable to ensure it meets the resiliency requirements essential to achieve those objectives.
- capable of scaling, growing, and adapting in the most efficient manner possible to support the sustainability requirements necessary to achieve those objectives.
As an IT leader in the financial services sector, the technology investments must be mapped back to the company’s successes, not just whether or not the projects are completed on time and within budget.
Citations
1, 2 – “Gartner Says Cloud Will Be the Centerpiece of New Digital Experiences,” Gartner, November 10, 2021 (link)