While cloud adoption by organisations accelerated during the pandemic, many financial organisations have chosen not to move back-office functions onto such external servers, according to a survey by Capgemini.
The percentage of survey respondents who said they had started moving services onto the cloud increased from 37 per cent in August 2020 to 91 per cent in August 2023. The report found high levels of executive confidence in such platforms being able to improve customer services and experience, provided their organisations were able to move to the right service provider.
Back-office not secure
“To date, cloud investments have happened most often in modern, user-friendly, customer-facing applications,” the report said. “More than 50 per cent of the financial services industry executives we surveyed said they have not started migrating core business applications to cloud.”
In fact, earlier in 2023 there were signs that cloud adoption was already slowing in the business world generally. That is primarily because many organisations were concerned that public cloud services are not secure enough to host their mission critical applications, according to a wide-ranging by the Uptime Institute in July 2023.
Almost two-thirds of respondents (65 per cent) to that survey did not place mission-critical workloads in the cloud. When asked why, almost two-thirds (64 per cent) of those cited data security as a barrier to adoption: 41 per cent also expressed concerns over regulation and compliance.
Resiliency
Corporate cloud users are often concerned over how resilient cloud providers are – most major services have suffered outages. For example, in summer this year, Google Cloud services’ clients faced outages in April 2023 when a flood hit one of its West European data centres.
The incident, caused by an unexpected leak, sparked a fire that resulted in emergency shutdowns of “multiple zones”. It took the company 16 hours to douse the fire. Microsoft and AWS also made the top ten list of cloud outages this year.
But the Uptime Institute did not see the slowdown as representing a potential peak in demand. “Public cloud will continue to be the near-automatic choice for most new applications, but organisations with complex, critical and hybrid requirements are likely to slow down or pause their migrations from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud,” it said.
