5 Cloud Migration Risks in Financial Services

The adoption of cloud infrastructure and cloud services in the financial services industry is steadily increasing. This is not surprising given the consumer demand for "always on" services and the needs of institutions to ensure those services are secure.

Every new project you want to launch to improve your business will potentially  begin with placing your data in the cloud, even if the outcome does not appear to be highly technical: mobile banking, staff working from home, strengthening the company's operational resilience, and so on. A solid cloud infrastructure will enable you to meet industry standards, improve operational resilience, and develop cutting-edge financial services to meet your customers needs.

In this article, we look at the five primary cloud migration issues to allow you to make an assessment on risk and choose the best solution for your operational needs.

1. Security: Extra touch points to the internet

The most common concern we hear from clients considering a cloud migration is: Is the cloud really more secure than keeping data on premise? And we understand why you would  worry. Financial services handle sensitive data and are frequently the target of cyberattacks. The question isn't easy to answer, and would create a range of different answers on the subject.

By definition, cloud infrastructures can offer extra touch points through external internet connections and private clouds, and these touch points increase when multicloud or hybrid approaches are used. IT teams usually create a different security boundary between each cloud service and the organisation’s network. However, these perimeters are typically established by default settings set by the service provider, which may differ from cloud to cloud, making them difficult to manage and maintain. Understanding exactly what settings exist for each provider is complicated and a potential obstacle for IT teams looking for ease of set up.

2. Cost and complexity: Large tie-ins

Many organisations  find it difficult to manage numerous technologies from multiple vendors. Despite many objectives being to cut costs, by moving to the cloud, it is easy to end up incurring additional fees for various cloud services, which can be a surprise line item on a bill. 

Additionally, commercial factors might increase the incapacity to change, implement, and adapt infrastructure 'at pace.' Large contractual tie-ins with traditional service providers can be incredibly difficult and expensive to break, stifling operational agility.

3. Speed and skills: Meeting 3rd party demands

Financial firms need a network infrastructure that is flexible enough to allow for a smooth workload migration, as well as the realisation of broader digital aspirations and transformation goals. 

Organisations have key objectives for their cloud migration, shifting workloads to enable their larger digital goals. However, when a company's requirements are crammed into the environment of a single cloud provider, the promises of speed, security, and scale are frequently shattered. These aspects make IT operations tough and time-consuming, such as scaling multiple clouds, and troubleshooting performance slowdowns.

4. Risk and redundancy: Loss of application performance

After migration, a company's mission- critical applications must meet the same or greater performance and availability standards. Any downtime caused by the loss of application performance or functionality during or after the transfer might harm customer experience and, as a result, revenue and reputation. 

5. Business disruption: Ever-changing market

Working from anywhere, online banking, remote access, cloud banking, and other business disruptions have all occurred in recent years in the financial industry. The pandemic has taught us that all we know can change in the blink of an eye. The financial services sector has to be more reactive to the market than ever before and to be responsive, your infrastructure must allow you flexibility.

Additionally, while shifting to and expanding in the cloud can be cost- effective, businesses may realise that their applications run too slowly, because of latency issues.

Mitigating cloud migration risks with SASE

In summary, financial services organisations are finding themselves in difficult positions as they try to balance the demands of their clients while making that work with multiple cloud providers and meeting new legislations. That's a lot of work for the IT staff, and it might potentially divert resources and money away from other projects. 

Being able to monitor and visualise the performance of your ecosystems is critical for identifying and mitigating potential cloud migration risks. This will assist you in identifying security threats across your ecosystem as well as network performance issues. 

Likewise, having real visibility of  your network can help you manage resources and money properly, as well as coordinate all of your security initiatives, such as zero-trust policies, to protect your networks.

A Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform can help facilitate your hybrid and multicloud strategies. The solution will help you better execute your security policies, enabling quick deployment and management of connections to multiple cloud providers, monitoring network performance, and scaling your cloud environments.

It will help you to reduce cost and networking complexity, improve resiliency and allow a secure connectivity path to migrate workloads whilst not impacting customer experience.

Agility is critical to adapt and  innovate in an increasingly digital world with high consumer expectations and increasingly sophisticated threats. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution was  born in the cloud to securely connect people, places and devices and offer our customers   scalability, elasticity, and automation   all leveraged in a cloud-centric solution.

Learn more about how we support the financial services sector here >>