Over the last few years, the cloud has garnered a lot of interest from the banking industry. While the cloud has the potential to transform the ways banks conduct their businesses, it is critical that banks take note of a few myths before embarking upon a cloud-driven growth strategy.  Cloud provides virtually unlimited capacity. But business needs to still forecast usage of cloud resources and ensure budgets are in place for its consumption.

Every cloud service provider and hosting service providers have their own unique selling points. Code written on on-premises environment need not work with the same performance on cloud. While most tier-1 cloud service providers like Azure, AWS and Google have invested heavily in securing their environment, this is usually only done till layer 5 of the network stack. Security still needs to be considered for the application layer.  From being a simple means to store non-critical data to helping banks innovate, the cloud has had an interesting role to play in the banking sector.

Over 30% of banks worldwide have said that more than 50% of their expenditure over the next 24 months will be on new cloud-based applications.1 These banks are expected to consume cloud services more innovatively. Some of the potential themes related to cloud adoption are discussed below:

Faster innovation: Banks can significantly collaborate with their partners across the globe over cloud-based project management platforms, sandboxes, DevOps methodologies and modular software development facilitated by the cloud. Software modules could be located on servers of different cloud providers, and banks could use them for a truly decentralised, cloud platform agnostic software development. This could lead to even shorter proof of concept (PoC) sprints, essentially aiding firms to ‘develop and innovate fast, fail fast, and learn fast’.

Another interesting development last year was the adoption of the cloud by the Government of India. This could create interesting opportunities for banks to offer various government-to-person (G2P) services over the cloud in 2018.

Financial institutions are continuously optimising their omnichannel strategies. In addition to existing channels, they are likely to make innovative use of the Internet of things (IoT) and sensors for capturing customer data in real time, thereby generating a huge quantum of data along the way. The cloud can serve as a great platform to store and analyse the data collected across multiple touchpoints. It can also be leveraged to deliver insights in real time and aid banks in offering innovative and customised solutions to their end customers.

The year 2017 witnessed several sophisticated cyberattacks, with a few well-known firms falling prey to them. Cloud providers that adopt global best practices and deploy the latest security features swiftly will continue to assist banks in protecting their customer data and managing risks as they grow.

Israel cloud computing service providers to help you stay ahead of your competitors in today’s dynamic world, most cloud service providers support hybrid capability, ease of deployment, management and upgrade, which allows you to expand cloud computing solutions as your business grows. Relevant companies, interested to learn more on Israel innovative technology are invited to contact the Trade and Economic Department at the Israeli Consulate General in Bengaluru.

For further queries:
contact: Kavitha Saravanan, Trade Officer, Trade and Economic Mission
Tel: +91-80-49406515. kavithas@israeltrade.gov.il