Five Reasons Why Public Cloud is Critical for Banking

2020 created many challenging demands on financial service institutions. Between dramatic increases in credit requests, an urgent need to provide online banking services, disruptions in consumer spending, and an increase in risky online transactions, COVID-19 has reshaped much of the business of banking. It has fundamentally challenged the resiliency, scalability, and elasticity of banking IT platforms. According to a recent IDC study, fewer than 20% of banks say they’ve recovered from these setbacks to achieve their “new normal.”¹

Spending on IT will continue to increase among banks as they accelerate their digital transformations to meet these changing demands and to prepare for future instability. A key enabler will be the increasing adoption of public cloud as a core IT resource for banks. With spending on public cloud as a percentage of IT budget nearly doubling from 2018 to 2020,¹ many banks are already migrating workloads to platforms like Google Cloud and partnering with cloud-native banking software specialists like Temenos to bring a full suite of banking services into the cloud and enable exceptional customer experiences. 2021 will see banks move beyond tactical solutions to bring more of their business intelligence, risk management, compliance, and other functions to public cloud.

Why Banks Should be Investing in Public Cloud

Here are the top five reasons banks need to invest in and integrate public cloud:

Resiliency and Recovery

This most important benefit of public cloud in banking is the ability to withstand outages and disasters and to flexibly recover from them with minimal interruptions in service or key operations. Banking IT is engaging public cloud services, such as Google Cloud’s Anthos, that enable you to run your workloads wherever you need them, and to manage them across on-premise data centers and the cloud.

Flexibly Run Enterprise Workloads

Public cloud offers greater elasticity and flexibility in how you run business workloads. Rather than needing to build on-premises resources, Google Cloud powered by Intel technology allows you to run Salesforce, SAP HANA, and other leading business workloads in the cloud wherever you need them.

AI and Advanced Analytics

Artificial intelligence (AI) processes such as inference and machine learning (ML) are allowing banks to automate functions such as fraud detection and providing automated “next best actions” for customers to make IT operations faster and more efficient. Google Cloud instances C2, N2, and M2 enabled by 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors greatly increase the speed of AI workloads, helping to reduce overall costs. N2 customers will be able to automatically upgrade to the 3rd gen Intel® Xeon Scalable processor in the Summer 2021 and immediately see the benefits for their workloads.

Efficiency and Productivity

Moving workloads to public cloud platforms allows you to automate tasks and reduces the staff you need to run them. It also allows you to quickly initialize massive computing resources for tasks such as risk assessment simulations and just as easily shut them down when you have what you need. What’s more, for day 2 operations, you can save on labor and costs associated with maintaining, patching, and updating VMs and physical servers by switching to modern CI/CD pipelines, image-based management, and desired-state configuration with Google Cloud’s Anthos.

Improved Data Security

Moving mission-critical operations to public cloud has left some banks concerned about data privacy. However, Google Cloud’s secure-by-design infrastructure, and Intel® technologies have security measures built in at the hardware level. In fact, many of the banks who have made the move to public cloud tout increased security as a key benefit.

Time to Innovate with Intel, Google Cloud, and Temenos

A bank’s competitive edge comes from the ability to innovate in ways that improve customers’ experiences and operational efficiencies. A divide is already forming between those who are able to accelerate through the digital transformation process and those who aren’t. The difference will be the ability to create and maintain resilient and agile IT infrastructure.

Anthos Intel® Select Solution technology allows your applications to run across on-premise data centers and in the public cloud. Combined with cloud banking solutions from Temenos, banks can run core banking, payments, and front office solutions at scale anywhere and leverage a consistent platform for both legacy as well as cloud native applications. As banks partner with public cloud solution providers, they’ll be able to focus more of their resources on what they do best—serve their customers’ financial needs.

Find out more about Intel Select Solutions for Google Cloud’s Anthos.

See how Temenos is helping banks transform.

Get more support and information at: http://intel.com/fsi

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