Nutanix,
Inc. today announced findings of its
Enterprise Cloud Index Report for the financial services sector,
measuring financial firms' plans for adopting private, public and hybrid
clouds. The report revealed that the financial sector outpaces other
industries in the adoption of hybrid cloud, with the deployment of
hybrid cloud reaching 21% penetration today, compared to the global
average of 18.5%.
Financial services firms today are facing
mounting competitive pressure to streamline operations while
delivering a differentiated experience to their customers, including
leveraging new technologies such as blockchain. This FinTech revolution,
combined with the growing burdens of regulatory compliance, data
privacy, and security issues are pushing CIOs to fundamentally transform
the technological underpinnings of their institutions. The report
reveals exactly how the financial services industry is embracing the
capabilities of cloud computing to address these needs.
It is also abundantly clear from the survey results that many financial
organizations are still struggling with modernizing their outdated
legacy IT architectures and processes, resulting in inefficient
operations and potential vulnerability to data breaches. In fact, the
report revealed financial services run more traditional data centers
than other industries, with 46% penetration. Despite their
progressiveness on the hybrid cloud front, financial organizations have
lower usage levels of private clouds than any other industry, at 29%
penetration compared to the average of 33%.
Like other industries, the financial services sector cites security and
compliance as the top factor in deciding where to run its workloads.
Nearly all respondents also indicated that performance, management, and
TCO are critical factors in the decision. However, more than 25% cited
these same factors as challenges with adopting public cloud. In other
words, as is often the case with new IT solutions, the most important
criteria are also the most difficult to achieve. This could account for
part of the disparity between the high desire to adopt hybrid cloud, and
today's relatively low hybrid cloud penetration levels of just 21% in
the financial services sector.
The bullish outlook for hybrid cloud adoption globally and across
industries is reflective of an IT landscape growing increasingly
automated and flexible enough that enterprises have the choice to buy,
build, or rent their IT infrastructure resources based on fast
transforming application requirements.
Other key findings of the report include:
-
The financial sector values application mobility across clouds.
Application mobility is the ability to move apps and workloads back
and forth across private and public cloud infrastructures as workload
type or economics warrant, while enjoying unified management and
operations. Both financial companies and other industries chose
application mobility between clouds second most often as the number
one perk to hybrid cloud, and the financial sector chose it 3% more
often than the average. 63% of financial industry respondents said
they considered inter-cloud application mobility "essential."
-
Financial services companies control cloud spend better. Another
motivation for deploying hybrid clouds is likely enterprises' need to
gain control over their IT spend. Organizations that use public cloud
spend 26% of their annual IT budget on public cloud, with this
percentage set to increase to 35% in two years' time. More than a
third (36%) of organizations using public clouds said their public
cloud spending exceeded budgets. In comparison, 33% of financial
respondents reported being over budget, revealing that they are doing
marginally better than others at managing public cloud expenses.
-
IT skills are a barrier to adopting hybrid cloud in the financial
industry. While 88% of respondents said that they expect hybrid
cloud to positively impact their businesses, hybrid cloud skills are
scarce in today's IT organizations. These skills ranked second in
scarcity only to those in artificial intelligence and machine learning
(AI/ML). Financial services respondents generally reportedly slightly
greater deficits in skillsets across all categories except for AI/ML.
91% of financial services organizations surveyed said that hybrid cloud
was the ideal IT model. This belief in hybrid cloud, and the fact that
the sector has higher than industry average adoption of hybrid cloud, is
likely driven by the recognized need for digital transformation. Yet
conversely, the data shows a lower adoption of private clouds than the
global average across industries. This might be explained by the fact
that portions of the financial services space have been change-averse
and also an indication of the overall complexity of modernizing existing
legacy infrastructures.
"Increased competitive pressure combined with higher security risks and
new regulations will require all of the industry to look at modernizing
their IT infrastructure," said Chris Kozup, SVP of Global Marketing at
Nutanix. "The current relatively high adoption of hybrid cloud in the
financial services industry shows that financial firms recognize the
benefits of a hybrid cloud infrastructure for increased agility,
security, and performance. However, the reality is that financial
services firms still struggle to enable IT transformation, even though
it is critical for their future."
To create this report, Nutanix commissioned Vanson Bourne to survey more
than 2,300 IT decision makers, including 333 worldwide financial
services organizations, about where they are running their business
applications today, where they plan to run them in the future, what
their cloud challenges are and how their cloud initiatives stack up
against other IT projects and priorities. The survey included
respondents from multiple industries, business sizes and geographies in
the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific
and Japan (APJ) regions.
To learn more about the global report and findings, please download the
"Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index 2018," here.