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| A CyberMedia Publication www.dqindia.com October 15, 2013 | 65
ENTERPRISE | IN FOCUSHarish Menon
Cashing in on the CloudIt is essential that the BFSI sector, as a whole, looks carefully at identifying, procuring and aligning the right type of cloud performance and security solutions
GROWING THE MONEY TREE
In today’s world, where more and more applications,
portals, and services are moving online, it is clear that
the sector is reaching the tipping point where the public
internet or the public cloud will play a larger role in their
infrastructure and delivery stack. But this also means
that soon they will face even greater challenges in terms
of internal/external performance, service availability for
customers, visibility of data transactions and security, in
degrees, which has hitherto never been dealt with.
The Indian Banking, Financial Services and Insur-
ance (BFSI) sector is going through a paradigm
shift, where the public internet is becoming a ma-
jor integrated part of the existing Information Technology
(IT) infrastructure stack. While many financial institutions
have made this transition, there are still a handful of them
that continue to resist this initiative. Their prime concerns
are most often centered on performance availability and
security. Though these are valid reasons, there are unpar-
alleled gains in adopting the internet for business.
66 | October 15, 2013 www.dqindia.com A CyberMedia Publication |
The direct benefit of moving to the public cloud is that
this will allow these companies’ end users to experience
convenient, manageable and informative services online
as well as offline. And with the right cloud optimization
service running in the background, it will help optimize
internet connections, extend the reach of data center
infrastructure, as well as balance traffic between multiple
cloud data centers, thus ensuring 100% application
availability, while also providing unparalleled visibility into
the usage of data.
With mobile optimization services as part of the cloud
optimization solutions, there will be greater focus on
newer growth areas like m-Banking, m-Trading, and
enterprise mobility. It would also positively raise the
level of performance and security in sensitive areas
such as trading, commercial banking, currency and
equity exchanges. Specifically related to trading, cloud
optimization solutions have the potential to offer a
further increase in Daily Average Revenue from Trades
(DART), due to enhanced performance on the trading
Web portals.
SELECTING THE RIGHT ROUTE
It is essential that the BFSI sector as a whole looks
carefully at identifying, procuring and aligning the right
type of cloud performance and security solutions for any
type of application delivery, ie, retail banking, trading,
marketing sites, etc. They need to be watchful, while
implementing cloud-based solutions to ensure they are
aligned to its core business as well as the regulatory and
technology goals of the financial services industry. This
is paramount, as although various mainstream cloud
solutions offer significant process acceleration and
enhanced performance, they may not be an appropriate
fit. Their value may be limited towards providing only
short-term benefits which is not one of the values that
the financial sector appreciates or veers towards. Also,
limited value may more than likely have an adverse impact
WITH MOBILE OPTIMIZATION SERVICES AS PART OF
THE CLOUD OPTIMIZATION SOLUTIONS, THERE WILL
BE GREATER FOCUS ON NEWER GROWTH AREAS LIKE
M-BANKING, M-TRADING, AND ENTERPRISE MOBILITY
ENTERPRISE | IN FOCUS
o Specifically related to trading, cloud optimiza-
tion solutions have the potential to offer a further
increase in Daily Average Revenue from Trades
(DART), due to enhanced performance on the
trading Web portals
o Cloud solutions would help BFSI companies
grow their individual organizations in terms of
their horizontal and back-office processes
TAKEAWAYS
The author is Product Manager, Asia
Pacific & Japan, Akamai Technologies, Inc
on the availability of the service and also compliance. An
example would be an agile Infrastructure as a service
(IaaS) model, which is easy to implement and deploy. In
the short run it might save on operating costs and provide
‘IT agility’, but in the long run reliability and security
maybe affected.
INCREASING INNER WEALTH
A further advantage to be reaped by BFSI companies is
that cloud solutions would help them grow their individual
organizations in terms of their horizontal and back-
office processes. Today, these processes may include
email, internal productivity, internal team collaboration,
ie, employees working from home or other locations,
knowledge sharing, etc. This will guarantee that their
organizational outreach and quality of service being
delivered to their end customers is more satisfying. The
end result would be the creation of a robust network
that is able to ensure adequate and secure data storage,
greater departmental collaboration, higher end user value
and lower operating costs. Thus, allowing the BFSI sector,
as a whole, to cash in on the cloud.
