Thousands of investment managers representing more than 200 countries are meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, this week, for Sibos, a business forum for the global financial community, to debate a wide-range of challenges facing the financial industry. A key topic of discussion is the industry's ability to migrate and adopt new and emerging technologies, such as virtual currencies and predictive analytics in an increasingly connected world.
Recently, Verizon convened a forum for some of the world's largest financial institutions and top regulators at its data center in Culpepper, Virginia to discuss the challenges facing these organizations when it comes to cloud computing.
I caught up with Tim Brophy, associate director Cloud Platform Security at Verizon Enterprise Solutions to discuss some of the key takeaways from Verizon's cloud strategy summit.
In Brophy's view, acceptance of cloud architectural patterns for the deployment of applications among financial institutions is more commonplace, but underlying questions are being asked about:
- what global clouds really are,
- how local deployments can work in conjunction with global footprint,
- how performance risk and security targets can be met,
- how service providers can take granular control over geographic data execution and storage.
Cloud Evolution
Brophy explained that networks are evolving and our customers' requirements of them are changing. "Global network coverage, a range of core technologies and flexible and varied access methods are key to supporting financial institutions today," Brophy said. "Through the diversification of the network and the introduction of broadband, wireless, 3G and 4G LTE we can almost reach everything from virtually anywhere."
He said that in the past, the cloud landscape in the financial services industry was typified by wholly-owned data centers, co-location and industry data centers.
"Many heterogeneous technologies and legacy systems created inertia to movement, but growth of virtualisation and new-generation application development platforms and container-based execution environments led to more economic and agile delivery of applications," Brophy acknowledged.
Driving Change
Constraints around premium resources and a thirst for agile delivery typified by the web start-up is driving change.
"Traditional constrained environments suffer from imperfect trade-offs between competing priorities, constrained capacity in premium facilities, high costs of delivery and red-tape that slows innovation," Brophy explained. "The promise of elastic capacity in flexible cloud environments, unconstrained all-you-can-eat capacity managed by IT teams embedded within the business and flexible agile delivery demands a new model."
Overall, Brophy says that the first generation of cloud has shaped the way that we think about applications, and has lifted the constraints that traditional data centers impose.
Verizon Cloud provides businesses including financial institutions with the flexibility to directly align the capabilities of the cloud infrastructure and surrounding services, such as management and onboarding, to the workload.
Read "Verizon Takes Workload-Driven Approach to the Cloud" to learn about the new features and services around cloud infrastructure and storage offering.
