For businesses in the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector, competition is stiffer than ever, customer expectations are constantly on the rise, and compliances are evolving and complex.

Technology holds the answers to each of these challenges, and more specifically, with managed services, a load of building an internal team is taken out of your hands while an experienced and specialized partner assures technical expertise. A managed service is like a concierge for your enterprise, taking you forward on the path to the promised land of ‘everything-as-a-service.’ And enabling you, as a BFSI business, to focus on your business’s core competencies.

Why businesses must rely on cloud managed services

Migrating business applications and IT systems to the cloud helps to streamline business operations while simplifying the management of key business applications. Businesses get a competitive edge for faster growth through increased customer engagement and agile operations by leveraging the flexible and scalable cloud infrastructure. Adding value to businesses in the long term is one of the main benefits of cloud migration.

Comprehensive cloud management is critical for businesses to maximize the benefits of their cloud operations that have high-risk exposure because of security threats and data loss that can disrupt business continuity. Therefore, regardless of the type of cloud environment, a hybrid or multi-tenant environment, it is essential to entrust the job of cloud management to some reliable Managed Service Provider with extensive knowledge and experience of the ecosystem.

Fully managed Cloud services ensure uninterrupted availability and comprehensive security of the cloud environment. Consequently, businesses can confidently explore and utilize the capabilities of the cloud infrastructure for improved performance and better results while maximizing their core business competencies.

Higher security, better compliance

To sustain the tremendous growth of the past few years, businesses in the BFSI sector must enhance their data handling to manage big data with support from some Managed Service Provider (MSP) that takes care of the Cloud operations. As the BFSI sector handles enormous data volumes that are extremely sensitive in nature, compliance, and security of the systems are paramount. With large-scale Cloud adoption, the security threats are constantly increasing and the aspects of compliance with the regulatory standards are becoming more challenging, especially for cross-border transactions.

The shared responsibility model for ensuring Cloud security works very well. MSPs take full responsibility for securing hardware and infrastructure across the business landscape covering regions, zones, and locations. Moreover, they also secure computing, databases, storage, and networking software. On the other hand, users are responsible for the security of their platform applications, operating systems, customer data, network, and workloads.

Cloud monitoring too is important because it ensures complete cooperation between all IT systems and the Cloud, which helps organizations to operate with high efficiency as all parts of the system work in harmony to ensure high performance.  Continuous surveillance of the Cloud connected services and other digital assets help identify potential vulnerabilities early and bolster security before they can cause any damage.

Companies in the BFSI sector must comply with various regulatory requirements. Since the design of Cloud infrastructure has regulatory aspects built into it, compliance becomes easy for Cloud users.

Know more about Cloud Security measures for Financial Services, and how AWS goes beyond

Cost optimization 

While it has become common practice for many BFSI businesses to migrate to cloud, it does not always follow that they are able to save on costs upon migration. They end up facing a huge cloud spend with increasing costs for innovating, improving performance and agility. Cost optimization comes with a deep understanding of cloud infrastructure, resources used on cloud, identifying the right pricing model, right sizing of applications, optimizing storage and so on.

Monitoring resource utilization, selecting the right services that are appropriate for the business, leveraging discounts and offers, setting up auto scaling and helping to keep track of costs with dashboards and visualization are also critical aspects that require cloud expertise. Cost optimization includes improving efficiency by disabling resources when they are not in use, or removing unused resources, evaluating workload efficiency by comparing costs and output, and continuously identifying spend and saving opportunities.

To summarize, cost optimization helps estimate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to evaluate the sustainability of the migration over a period of time. Find out more about optimizing for costs and governance.

Getting the best out of automation 

One of the key benefits of cloud, as we all know, is automation. Automation helps build, test and deploy faster, ensures compliance and security, and high-quality delivery. Automation enables redundancy, fast paced changes, duplication of environments and elasticity.

However, getting the best out of automation necessitates creating a framework that favors automation, and one that adheres to best practices. When you get it right, automation gives control over resource usage, helps manage infrastructure more efficiently, and provides power where it is most needed while enabling cost and time savings.

To optimize automation, one requires knowledge of templates, Infrastructure as Code (IaaS), security best practices and governance. It is important to establish a control environment built on best practices that are framed from compliance objectives, validations, and verifications. Availing Managed Services for automation can help gain control over enterprise applications on cloud and to find the right balance between centrally managing cloud and decentralizing where needed.

Well-Architected Review

You are on cloud and whether you are benefiting from it or not, have you thought about understanding how you can improve and get better control over costs and security? This is where a Well Architected Review (WAR) gains significance; it helps you review the health and state of your architecture in terms of best practices, design principles and industry best practices. WAR consists of five pillars that include operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. The assessment helps businesses understand where they stand in terms of these five pillars and to identify remediation steps.

WAR is most effective in addressing growing concerns in performance, costs and security and offers a well-defined approach to enhance cloud infrastructure. Implementing WAR helps identify gaps in the cloud infrastructure and recommends remediation aimed at optimization. This can enable right sizing of resources, gaining control over spiraling costs, bringing flexibility and ensuring continuous compliance and security.

Conclusion

Banking and Financial services businesses must explore the Cloud to the fullest for faster business growth, ensuring business continuity and governance and compliance. Managed Service Providers can help achieve these goals of using Cloud technology for business gains effectively and help BFSI companies save on costs, enable security and innovation.