Asia’s banks should learn to learn to love the cloud as a key enabler
Mon 7 Jul 2014
Cloud is a capability that banks will have to master in order to build an agility advantage according to one of Asia’s leading analysts.
Writing in his blog, Frederic Giron, a vice president and principal analyst with Forrester in Singapore (pictured), describes some case studies of financial services companies. He said: “Cloud is a key enabler of Yuebao, Alibaba’s new Internet finance business. 80 million users in less than 10 months? Only cloud architecture can enable that type of agility and scale (an idea that Hong Kong regulators clearly overlooked).”
He also called on regulators in Hong Kong and Singapore to create regulatory environments that are more conducive to cloud adoption, local and regional and that banks should not be intimidated by cloud. “They should familiarize themselves with the clear similarities between cloud-based approaches and more traditional managed services models,” he said. “It’s a way for them to learn how to start sharing risk and responsibility with external service providers.
Giron outlined three key areas where banks need to build on their managed hosting experience.
“Banks tends to view managed services – let alone cloud services – negatively, so getting buy-in from key business stakeholders is critical”. He describes this as “socialising the concept”.
He said they need to build trust in and adoption an off-premise delivery model. “Dedicated connectivity and infrastructure environments can be logical extensions to the banks’ technology capabilities and deliver significant value in terms of cost effectiveness and agility while keeping the bank’s core functions in a highly secured and controlled environment,” he said.
Banks need to create successful customer engagements particularly with mobile technology said Giron. He said this “will require the right engagement mind-set and leveraging partners including cloud service providers”.
