Debunking the Cloud Myth – Never Say Never
October 31st, 2016
There are still a few myths remaining that surround SaaS cloud implementations these days, but one by one they are gradually being busted. One of the most prevalent myths that keeps financial institutions from adopting cloud connects to the fact they many of them are afraid to send data outside their institutions. More and more, we see among our customers that these fears are unfounded, and some form of cloud adoption is now seen as a competitive advantage.
Recently, NICE Actimize held its premiere customer event, the ENGAGE Client Forum where more than 400 financial services industry leaders gathered to discuss and debate the technologies that are impacting their concerns now and which will be in the future. In more than one session, cloud solutions were an integral part of the dialogue. One panel that highlighted this discussion featured Actimize subject matter experts and Amazon Web Services (AWS), talking about the deployment of financial crime and compliance solutions in the cloud from the perspective of financial institutions. NICE Actimize and AWS have worked together with range of clients across multiple regions.
AWS is a strong partner that has helped us build a secure and resilient platform for our SaaS clients and we have worked together with range of clients across multiple regions. According to Nitin Gupta, Global Head, Financial Services Partners, at Amazon Web Services, the industry is well on its way to adopting more cloud deployments. He noted that, “Perhaps unexpectedly, the shift to cloud is not predicated by the size of the institution, and many large FI’s as well as small ones are moving applications to public cloud.”
The primary driver for engaging SaaS or hosted services is cost, but not necessarily cost of data centers and servers. During the discussion, Chris Suarez, VP Compliance, PlainsCapital Bank, emphasized, “Cost is more connected to people and the IT staff it takes to run and maintain enterprise software. Those high value resources typically cost more than a SaaS annual fee and are better used serving business problems and investigations instead of maintaining disk drives, databases, and software patches.”
Regulators are also pushing financial institutions to maintain a consistency of processes maintain up-to-date tools, according to our panel discussion. It’s a common story where FI’s are constantly playing catch up with their software. The promise of SaaS is that this maintenance burden is gone.
All of these observations demonstrate that, while the world is still divided on cloud, change is well on its way and the technology is moving quickly in such force to address a range of operational concerns. At our conference, we saw more than one customer admit, while somewhat fearful of cloud, they were looking at ways to start adding cloud to their mix of solutions. The great part of an event like this is that customers can ‘compare notes’ on use cases and success stories – and they surely did.
We think that our clients have a good opportunity to get ahead of the compliance and tech adoption curve, and our partnership with AWS will continue to increase credibility and security thereby fostering greater cloud adoption.
