Financial services orgs likely to double multi-cloud adoption in 3 years: Report

Though financial services organisations have been slow in adopting multi-cloud than any other industry surveyed, their adoption is expected to nearly double from 26% to 56% in the next three years, according to the findings of Nutanix’s global 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research report, which measures enterprise progress with cloud adoption in the industry.  

Among financial services ECI respondents, 31% are still operating non-cloud-enabled three-tier data centres as their only IT infrastructure. They also reported having the lowest deployment of all industries surveyed in public cloud usage, with 59% using no public cloud services compared to 47% globally.  

The complexity of managing across cloud borders remains a major challenge for these organisations, with 84% of respondents agreeing that success requires simpler management across multi-cloud infrastructures, and 50% citing security concerns as a challenge to the multi-cloud model. To address top challenges related to security, interoperability, and data integration, 82% agree that a hybrid multi-cloud model, an IT operating model with multiple clouds both private and public with interoperability between, is ideal. 

“While the financial services industry appears to be in the early phases of deployment, the evolution to an interoperable multi-cloud IT infrastructure that spans a mix of private and public clouds is underway,” said Anand Akela, vice president of Product and Solutions Marketing at Nutanix. “As information security and operational resiliency remain front and centre for financial services organisations, they must look to hybrid multi-cloud solutions with integrated manageability and security, and the ability to quickly move apps among cloud infrastructures cost-effectively.” 

Application mobility is top of mind. Nearly all financial services respondents (98%) have moved one or more applications to a new IT environment over the last 12 months, likely from traditional data centres to private clouds given the industry’s relatively low multi-cloud and public cloud penetration. Faster app development (43%) was most often cited as the reason for the move, followed closely by security (42%), and integrating with cloud-native services (40%).  

Top financial services IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months include improving security posture (54%), improving multi-cloud management (49%), and developing and/or implementing cloud-native technologies (47%). When asked what their organisations had done differently because of the pandemic, 70% said that they had increased spending to strengthen their security posture, 64% spent more on increasing AI-based self-service automation, and 64% invested in infrastructure upgrades.