A decade ago, financial services companies struggled to find where cloud technology would fit into their existing IT landscape. Today, nearly every financial services institution has some semblance of public or private cloud use, underpinning more modern applications and workloads.
Financial institutions are challenged to know what can and should be migrated to the cloud, what is best developed as a cloud-native application, which cloud providers to select, and how to best manage any desired combination cohesively. As firms continue along their cloud journey, the adoption of a hybrid cloud approach can offer a means to optimize and manage multiple environments, allowing institutions to build common workflows, skills, and processes for any application while avoiding restrictions of any one cloud vendor.
Not all clouds are created equal
As any chief information officer (CIO) or IT executive can attest, the larger an institution becomes, the more business units it creates, and the harder it can become to create consistency among corresponding, isolated areas. While individual cloud providers offer unique benefits, those benefits come with unique tools and configurations. Even with IT standards in place, teams will select the cloud provider technology that suits their specific application needs. Hybrid cloud delivers on the full strategic business value and promise of cloud computing because it crosses different environments with consistent tooling and management. By embracing a hybrid cloud approach, one that is consistent across the enterprise, organizations can have both public and private clouds that:
- Preserve portability of applications and data across clouds.
- Fully use existing IT investments and infrastructure and connect isolated areas.
- Build an environment that spans physical servers, multiple virtualization platforms, the edge, and public clouds–consistently managing a variety of technology stacks.
- Allow IT organizations to progressively expand and evolve cloud-native capabilities like continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and IT automation, which add incremental value to the business.
- Put the institution at the helm, directing their own technology strategy based on their timeline.
Why open matters
Financial institutions need to evolve to meet the rapidly expanding demand for always-on digital services and ever-present connectivity. The industry is adapting to meet the demand for faster, more widespread access to essential applications and services while maintaining operational stability and resilience. In order to succeed, companies cannot be tied to legacy software stacks, tribal code knowledge, nor expensive, proprietary technologies that are unable to digitally adapt and scale.
An open source approach, on the other hand, helps firms create higher value in hybrid cloud implementation with the introduction of DevOps culture and modern practices, like containerization, continuous deployment, traceable code, automated orchestration, and analytics-driven performance management, with the extended talent pool of innovation provided by open source communities. By using enterprise-hardened open source technologies like Linux® and Kubernetes, organizations have access to innovation that is tested and supported for current application needs, secured on a continual basis, and extensible as new innovation is desired, with greater flexibility than proprietary vendors can provide.
Build anything, deploy everywhere
The freedom that comes from a hybrid cloud infrastructure helps financial services firms take control over how they build applications and choose partners. Hybrid cloud also allows financial services to optimally use the multitude of cloud options available, deliver consistent, enterprise wide automation, develop leading IT skills, and provide security and governance regardless of where the application is deployed.
Hybrid cloud allows you to:
- Bring new applications and services online quickly for faster time-to-revenue.
- Respond more quickly to opportunities and threats.
- Reduce risk by maintaining ongoing compliance and runtime management while preserving strategic flexibility.
- Deploy skilled personnel to meet business demands.
Red Hat and hybrid cloud infrastructure
Cloud technology is built for agility, allowing you to rapidly respond to changes and scale in the face of increased demands. However, not all cloud strategies are created equal. Without careful planning, you could find yourself locked into specific vendors, which results in the same lack of agility you experience with on-premise, heritage solutions. By using enterprise open source software, institutions can implement a hybrid cloud infrastructure solution that enables a consistent developer experience and can be managed by a single operations team working within one operational environment.
Learn more
Discover how hybrid cloud can provide the infrastructure and tools to harness innovation and elastically scale to meet customer demand. Visit www.redhat.com/fsi.
