Financial Services Organizations Are Adopting Multicloud

Financial services survey respondents were asked about their current cloud challenges, how they’re running business and mission-critical applications now, and where they plan to run them in the future. Respondents were also asked about the impact of the pandemic on recent, current, and future IT infrastructure decisions and how IT strategy and priorities may change because of it.

The research showed that fewer financial services organizations have adopted multicloud than any other industry surveyed, trailing the global average by 10 percent. However, adoption is expected to nearly double from 26 percent to 56 percent in the next three years, in line with the global trend of evolving to a multicloud IT infrastructure that spans a mix of private and public clouds.

Among financial services ECI respondents, 31 percent are still operating non-cloud-enabled three-tier datacenters as their only IT infrastructure. They also reported having the lowest deployment of all industries surveyed in public cloud usage, with 59 percent using no public cloud services compared to 47 percent globally, likely due to substantial existing legacy investments in applications and the highly regulated nature of the industry.

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