Financial organisations leading the way for hybrid cloud, Nutanix finds

When it comes to hybrid cloud deployments, that is hosting workloads in both private and public cloud, financial companies are far outdoing their counterparts in other industries.

This is according to new research from Nutanix, which has recently released its second Enterprise Cloud Index Report.

Part of the report measures financial firms' plans for adoption private, public and hybrid clouds.

Financial companies are arguably under a lot more pressure in regards to security, and for obvious reasons. In accordance with this, Nutanix finds 60% of respondents state security is the single biggest influence on future cloud strategies.

Furthermore, financial companies are running the highest percentage of data centers today, with just over 59% of financial companies.

Accounting in part for this trend is dissatisfaction with public cloud, with only 39% of financial services companies reporting public cloud services were completely meeting their expectations.

Flexibility to move applications is an important need that is currently underserved, according to the report.

In fact, nearly three-quarters of financial companies surveyed (71%) shared their plans to move one or more applications running in a public cloud back on-premises.

In the financial services industry, regulatory requirements are often being updated and as a result companies must be on top of how they are storing and managing data.

Respondents also ranked hybrid cloud as the most secure IT operating model (27% of the time), due to the importance of flexibility, alongside security.

However, there is growing pressure and encouragement for financial companies to embrace digital transformation, making services more convenient and modernising IT.

As such, this explains that 18% of financial companies have deployed hybrid cloud, while 51% plan to shift investment to hybrid cloud in just three to five years, Nutanix states.

Financial services selected "support for remote/branch office users" as a motivator for cloud decisions nearly 30% of the time, a significantly higher percentage than cross-industry averages.

According to Nutanix, this indicates that the workplace is increasingly remote, and that digital transformation is important in customer experience.

In the short term, respondents listed lack of adoption stemming from concerns around nascent tools for managing hybrid environments (66%), a lack of hybrid cloud skills (30%) and a lack of cloud-native development skills (23%).

Nutanix VP South Asia Pacific Neville Vincent says, "As Australia and New Zealand's financial industry adapts to pressure from fintechs and bank disruptors and increasing regulation requirements, the time to innovate is now.

Vincent says, "We're seeing greater appetite among our ANZ financial services customers to leverage hybrid cloud to end up on the right side of that and stay competitive in a changing industry.

"But it's also helping those organisations gain, or often regain, control of their IT investment and their data while remaining secure and compliant.

"The greater need for IT capability and support at remote or branch offices shows us how important the edge is for financial institutions.

"Cloud decisions need to factor in the rapidly accelerating amounts of data coming through these edge locations, particularly in a large but widely dispersed region like ANZ.

Nutanix VP product marketing Greg Smith says, "The financial sector's digital transformation is aggressively driving data center modernisation and cloud adoption.

"Ambitious, but necessary, plans to shift investment to hybrid clouds clearly demonstrate that financial companies recognise the obvious benefits.

"With hybrid cloud infrastructure, financial companies can enjoy application mobility across clouds and gain greater control of their IT spend, while remaining confident in the security of their data.