Trends related to cloud usage by financial services organizations (based on responses from the 154 survey respondents from financial services organizations) include:
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While “migrating more workloads to cloud” is the second-most prevalent cloud initiative across all survey respondents (Figure 25), it is the top initiative among financial services organizations, with 62% indicating plans to move more workloads to the cloud in 2022.
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This may be an indication of increasing confidence in the security tools and processes of cloud providers to implement adequate protection. 35% of financial services organizations (31% overall) anticipate using a mix of on-prem and cloud/SaaS for consumer data (PII/PHI, etc.); 33% of financial services organizations (26% overall) anticipate using a mix of on-prem and cloud/SaaS for corporate financial data.
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The top challenge that financial services organizations face in migrating workloads to public cloud (as reported by 58%) is assessing the technical feasibility of migrating an application.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are relied on nearly evenly within financial services. 78% of financial services organizations are running workloads on Amazon Web Services; 76% of them are running workloads on Azure. When it comes to where the instances are running, 46% of financial services organizations (44% overall) are running more than 100 instances in AWS; 51% of financial services organizations (45% overall) are running more than 100 instances in Azure. 22% of financial services organizations are spending more than $6 million/year on AWS; 18% are spending more than $6 million a year on Azure
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Use of public cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) services is increasing overall. The most heavily used PaaS services are shifting. Today, the top PaaS services being used by financial services organizations are data warehousing, reported by 51%; DBaaS (Relational), reported by 50%; DBaaS (NoSQL), reported by 44%; and container-as-a-service, reported by 43%. The top PaaS services being experimented with by financial services organizations are: container-as-a-service, reported by 31%; artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), reported by 29%; disaster recovery-a-service, reported by 28%; and Serverless (Function-as-a-Service), reported by 27%.
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The current and planned use of containers is part of a trend as containers move into the mainstream, with more financial services organizations (31%) planning to experiment with it than is the case overall (25%). With the move comes the need for training. The lack of internal staff with expertise is the top container-related challenge for all organizations, 42% citing it as “very much of a challenge”), and an even greater challenge for financial services organizations, with 47% citing it as “very much of a challenge.”
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Central IT is more likely to play a role in a company’s cloud (IaaS) adoption than is the case overall. Responsibilities for central IT at financial services organizations include deciding or advising on which applications are appropriate to migrate to cloud (69% for financial services organizations v. 61% overall); planning for cloud migrations (61% for financial services organizations v. 58% overall); and setting policies for how/when cloud can be used (60% for financial services organizations v. 55% overall).