Banks benefit from managed multicloud services and platforms

Many financial services companies have had to digitise activities faster than they had planned. During the pandemic, for example, these businesses had to have a way to continue providing seamless online services when physical engagement with customers became restricted. This and other factors have increased the use of scalable cloud services.

At the same time, many organisations’ cloud strategies have changed from a purely cloud first approach to one that considers appropriate platform and time for the workload transition. Being able to select a service unique to a particular cloud service provider enables a competitive advantage — the business gains immediate access to toolkits to help drive digital business transformation. While the march to cloud has accelerated, organisations remain under pressure to ensure that true business value is the driver.     

New technology, such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), is spurring an era of transformational innovation in the BCM industry as companies seek to improve decision-making, optimise operations, accelerate the provision of new services and enhance customer experiences. Given that businesses will use a mixture of public, private and hybrid clouds to fuel this digital transformation, having effective multicloud managed services in place is crucial for achieving success in key areas such as governance, regulatory compliance and operational efficiency.

The rise of fintech startups also has increased competition and innovation while completely transforming customer engagement. To remain competitive, traditional BCM companies are pressured to minimise time from project ideation to first customer use, while dealing with the complexity of integrating well-established legacy systems with modern services offered by third-party providers and infrastructure vendors.

The case for multicloud

Success in the financial services industry requires the ability to derive value, often by monetising the  large amounts of data these institutions typically have to deliver superior and personalised customer service, and get to market quickly with innovative services — all while controlling compute and storage costs. A properly deployed multicloud environment enables the agility, scalability and compute services that banks need to meet the demands of the modern banking customer and maintain a competitive advantage.

Also, a new European Union (EU) regulation, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), is coming into effect in 2025, and it will up the requirements on financial services organisations to provide Information and Computer Technology (ICT) resilience and robustness, A multicloud approach can support organisations’ compliance with these new regulations to provide IT continuity services.     

To achieve enhanced business resiliency and innovation, financial services organisations are turning to cloud platforms and related service offerings. A key driver for this switch is the appeal of a pay-for-use model that delivers measurable cost savings. Clouds’ pay-for-use model also supports a “fail-fast and recover” model, which gives companies the ability to experiment quickly with innovative services. Enterprises are also finding that a combination of multiple cloud environments and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings meet their needs for portability, scalability and interoperability.  

Primary examples of cloud services used by financial services organisations include:

• Microsoft Azure for virtual desktops and for tapping into Dynamics 365 capabilities, and for the tools being created around AI and machine learning
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) for transforming customer experiences with intelligent data and analytics
• Google Cloud Platform for high-performance computing that drives high-speed transaction processing
• CSP on-premise platforms (Azure Stack, AWS Outpost and Google Anthos) for hosting edge computing workloads
• Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer for Banking for data management and modernisation to enable agile cloud infrastructure and automation
• IBM Cloud for container, platform and infrastructure as-a-service capabilities

While financial services companies are deploying numerous clouds that can meet their specific needs, most organisations are initially exploring moving business functions that have traditionally been on-premises to a SaaS model. Primary examples of this transformation include the shift to cloud-based ServiceNow, Workday and Salesforce instances to run application-specific tasks. In addition, services from leading infrastructure vendors such as VMware, Cisco and HPE can augment the backbone on which complex systems run. This has been made more feasible with all adopting consumption billing models.

Embracing a multicloud strategy is delivering numerous benefits to many financial services organisations. For one, a multicloud architecture enhances the reliability and resiliency of systems as workloads are distributed across multiple providers. Another advantage of leveraging multiple clouds is gaining the ability to process data in different clouds in different regions throughout the world, which allows companies to meet local data sovereignty regulations and compliance requirements.

Financial services organisations are also finding that a multicloud approach delivers lower operational costs, in addition to improved performance. This is accomplished by migrating workloads to multicloud while re-engineering business processes to harness lower-cost technology enablers. For example, enterprises are gaining improved visibility into their spending while reducing energy usage. In addition, productivity gains are being made via deeper automation (policy-as-code for provisioning compute services, observability and remediation, audit and compliance) and operating model transformation.

Putting multicloud to work

Financial services organisations are challenged to place their data and applications on resources that make the most sense for their specific business, cost and performance requirements. The business value of these resources can increase significantly with the strategic integration of third-party SaaS instances and services offered by infrastructure providers. The good news for financial services companies is that there are many pre-defined and pre-bundled cloud-native solutions built specifically for the industry — for example, Microsoft’s Azure for Financial Services. The key to success is knowing how to integrate, orchestrate and control all the different technologies at play in a complex multicloud environment.

DXC Technology combines decades of experience and expertise, along with strong industry partnerships, to help financial services organisations reap the many benefits multicloud has to offer. DXC helps BCM companies manage multicloud the correct way, through precision-guided modernisation to manage existing on-premises investments while identifying the best use of public and private cloud to achieve business objectives. Unlike standard assessments, this looks at financial modeling to determine when and if platforms will deliver the anticipated value. 

Managed multicloud services involves implementing a unified control plane that provisions resources and manages workloads across all public and private cloud landing zones. As a leader in managed multicloud services, DXC helps financial services organisations across the globe improve security, standardise governance and control expenses. DXC’s managed service for workloads includes essential functions such as security, monitoring, patching and service desk.

Here are some of the ways DXC helps financial services companies achieve their business goals via managed multicloud services:

• Industry partnerships. Tapping into our extensive managed cloud migration and integration expertise, DXC uses processes, tools and strong industry partnerships to successfully integrate multicloud environments to reduce complexities and risk. DXC is a longstanding partner with the three leading cloud providers –  AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure – and has performed thousands of cloud migrations with each one. In fact, DXC migrates close to 50,000 workloads and 14,000+ applications to cloud every year.
• FinOps capabilities. Lowering costs is imperative for all organisations, yet many BCM companies find that moving applications and workloads to the cloud is less cost-effective than expected. Using financial management tools, DXC helps our customers understand the costs associated with deploying multiple clouds and cloud-related services, while also being inclusive of on-prem costs. DXC has partnerships with several software providers to help our customers find ways to reduce costs and technical debt, but more importantly to help them through the crawl, walk, run cycle appropriately – that is, how we help customers on their journey, leveraging tools as needed to help drive continuous improvements and benefits .
• Regulatory compliance. Companies that embrace a multicloud strategy can choose from providers’ multiple regions or availability zones to meet specific data sovereignty requirements. With a global reach across five continents, DXC has extensive experience in helping BCM organisations across the world meet country-specific domain regulations.   
• VMware expertise. VMware has more than two decades of experience as a provider of advanced technology solutions to BCM organisations. Through our long-standing partnership with VMware, DXC solutions leverage VMware technologies to help  financial services organisations consolidate and modernise their data centers and applications, transform security and manage multicloud environments. 
• SAP expertise. Through our long-standing partnership with SAP, DXC offers solutions for fully managed SAP services on cloud (Azure, AWS, Google), and PaaS for SAP on-premise, including unique migration services. DXC is serving over 850 customers globally.
• Modern platforms and AI. Use cases for leveraging modern platforms in banking include using GenAI to speed up or automate business tasks, and deploying virtual assistants for customer support. DXC Platform X™ is an AI-driven intelligent automation platform that helps enterprises deploy resilient, self-healing IT across their entire IT estate. In a BCM context, DXC is leveraging Platform X technology in areas such as managing mainframes, delivering software-defined hyperconverged infrastructure solutions and implementing edge computing strategies. In addition, DXC can help enterprises integrate AI to bolster functions such as detecting fraud, automating tasks and generating stress-test scenarios.
• Layered security. Because BCM companies are in possession of a massive amount of personal data, maintaining rock-solid data security is a top priority. DXC offers a layered security approach when providing managed multicloud services by using a combination of multiple migrating security controls to protect data. Security for multicloud focuses on a well-defined architected interaction between software (portals and APIs) and one or more cloud solutions, integrated with security layers that include intrusion detection and ransomware recovery.
• Containers everywhere approach. For BCM companies, the proper use of container technology is essential for having the application portability and operational resiliency needed to remain competitive. DXC leverages container technology to help banks meet security and regulatory requirements while providing capabilities such as superior disaster recovery. DXC container management services support ongoing services provided from cost-effective locations.
• Skills and expertise. Lack of pertinent skills is often cited by BCM companies as a huge barrier to achieving IT initiatives. Managing more than 25,000 cloud migrations every year, DXC has the skills and industry experience to deliver complex multicloud solutions. DXC has 28,000+ employees holding certifications with cloud providers. DXC’s capabilities go well beyond carrying thousands of certifications – our professionals are skilled practitioners with industry-specific knowledge in important business sectors including BCM.
• Optimising what is left and moving towards smart infrastructure. While the focus is towards the cloud, equal focus should be directed towards the infrastructure layer in its entirety in a fluid and dynamic way. DXC is considered a backbone for many companies in this capacity, harmonising enterprise infrastructure monitoring; infusing AI to get ahead of incidents; optimising mainframes; systematically helping organisations move away from high-cost, high-power consumption on-prem units to more efficient low-cost, lower-power platforms; modernising networking; and rationalising data centres. DXC takes a holistic approach to ensure infrastructure adapts to the need of the application layer and therefore the business. 

DXC’s BCM experience includes managing 250 million customer deposits and processing 275 million cards daily, and this expertise extends to the cloud. For example, DXC helped GoldenSource, a leading data management software vendor for the BCM industry, expand its customer offerings by moving key applications to a SaaS model hosted on an AWS cloud. Among many benefits, the transformation helped GoldenSource quickly introduce new risk-management capabilities to improve the delivery of services while lowering costs.

Achieving value from multicloud

BCM organisations can achieve significant benefits from deploying multicloud, but doing so requires carefully managing key functions such as security, data integration and application compatibility. Also, continually observing cloud service utilisation to identify optimal resource allocation recommendations ensures cost efficiency.  By utilising multiple cloud providers, companies can reduce dependence on a single vendor and mitigate risks associated with service outages, security breaches and performance issues.

The wide range of public cloud and cloud-based SaaS offerings designed specifically for the BCM industry make multicloud a smart choice.

Learn more about DXC Cloud and Banking & Capital Markets