How can FS keep up with modern multicloud environments?

By Gaia Lamperti

Research has revealed financial institutions are struggling to keep up with the complex multicloud environments that power modern banking and insurance services. These environments are crucial for financial organisations, as they provide the agility needed to deliver world-class digital experiences and develop a constant stream of new banking and insurance products.

However, financial services firms’ IT departments and digital teams are inundated by data and currently spend hours on manual, routine tasks just to manage their cloud environments. This strain impacts the time they have to drive innovation and create value for the business.

Key findings from the global study commissioned by cloud platform Dynatrace, which surveyed 130 CIOs and senior IT practitioners responsible for driving innovation in the financial services industry, found that:

• Drive for faster financial innovation. 99% of financial institutions have adopted a multicloud environment to keep up with the accelerating pace of digital transformation.
• Growing IT complexity. On average, financial services organisations rely on 7 different solutions to monitor their multicloud infrastructure.
• Infrastructure monitoring issues impact customer experience. 64% of financial institutions say the abundance of tools makes it difficult to optimise the performance of their infrastructure.
• Lack of visibility impacts revenue. 92% of organisations in the financial services sector say they need better visibility and understanding into the impact investments in IT infrastructure have on revenue growth.
• Blind spots pose a risk to innovation. 71% of respondents say visibility blind spots in their multicloud environments pose a risk to digital transformation, as financial services sector IT teams find themselves without an easy way to monitor their infrastructure end-to-end.

“Today’s consumers expect more from their financial services providers than ever before. Not only must they keep our money safe and accessible, they must also continue to provide innovative new services that ensure customers have seamless digital experiences – whether they are making an insurance claim, taking out a mortgage, or transferring money between accounts,” said Greg Adams, Regional Vice President, UK & Ireland at Dynatrace.

“Multicloud architectures have been critical to financial institutions’ ability to keep up with growing customer expectations, as they provide the agility needed to innovate faster and continually optimise services. However, teams are struggling to manage these complex multicloud environments, which takes up time that could be invested into driving digital transformation and delivering the high-quality experiences customers want,” he added.

“Financial institutions face more competition than ever before, especially when it comes to digital experience. Fintechs that were born in the cloud can innovate quickly, as they do not have to deal with the complexity of managing a legacy on-premises environment,” continued Adams. “By contrast, IT teams at incumbent financial services firms must spend significant time manually extracting the insights they need to keep a complex hybrid infrastructure running effectively. Traditional monitoring solutions are no longer effective. Financial services organisations require a more intelligent approach that can keep up with their modern, multicloud environments. By combining end-to-end observability, AI, and automation, they can free up their teams’ time to refocus on accelerating the delivery of high-quality, innovative, and reliable financial services experiences to their customers.”

Key highlights

• Manual approaches are no longer sufficient. 54% of financial institutions say traditional infrastructure monitoring solutions are no longer fit for purpose in a multicloud world.
• Monitoring IT drains financial services firms’ resources. Almost half (48%) of respondents say infrastructure management is a growing drain on IT resources, as teams are forced to switch between different solutions and dashboards to gain insights.
• Manual, routine tasks impede productivity. Nearly half (42%) of financial services innovators’ time is wasted on manual, routine work to “keep the lights on” across their environments, creating a major productivity drain and missed revenue opportunities due to innovation delays.
• A unified platform is at the heart of financial services success. More than half (54%) of respondents believe traditional infrastructure monitoring approaches must be replaced with a platform that can provide end-to-end visibility across multicloud environments.