By Chris Pickles, Head of Industry Initiatives, Global Banking & Financial Markets, BT
Financial institutions are gradually waking up to all that the “cloud” can be about. Not just the “public cloud” that is the public Internet, or the “private cloud” that they can build to share their internal services more effectively, but also “private managed clouds” that act like private internets and allow multiple banks to share resources, applications and services both domestically and internationally.
Financial institutions are faced with exponentially-growing volumes of data – “Big Data,” as the problem is now called. This data is not only from internal operations where it may serve millions of retail clients, but also from trading activities. Today, a dealing room in a single bank in a single city has to be able to process more than 6 million messages per second. Multiply that by the number of dealing rooms and banks in the world, and you start to see why the “yottabyte” unit of measure becomes necessary.
And yet, much of that data is identical for each bank – incoming data from outside counterparts and service providers that keeps the bank in touch with what is happening in the outside world and around the world. As data volumes continue to grow exponentially, the likelihood reduces that each bank will be able to bear the cost of managing its own separate island of data and communications and still remain commercially profitable. Increasing regulatory requirements for capital adequacy also mean that they have less cash to put into their own technology islands.
As the tide of data rises inexorably, banks will have to strike out from their individual and separate islands and start sharing resources more than they have ever done before. The cloud is fundamental to that ability to share – and security is fundamental to making cloud approaches work in the real world.