While current adoption of hybrid multicloud deployments remains consistent year-over-year in the financial services sector, DevOps/Platform Engineering decision-makers expect adoption to increase by three times in the next three years, making it the leading IT model in the sector.
This is from the latest annual Financial Services Enterprise Cloud Index report from Nutanix. For the sixth consecutive year, Vanson Bourne conducted research on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,500 IT and DevOps/Platform Engineering decision-makers around the world in December 2023.
Respondents were based in North and South America; Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and Asia-Pacific-Japan (APJ) region.
The report revealed that data security and ransomware protection, implementing AI strategies, and minimising cost are driving IT decision makers infrastructure priorities.
Almost all (99%) of ECI financial services respondents shared that they had experienced a ransomware attack at some point in the past three years.
Also, 89% agreed that their organisations had room for improvement when it came to their ability to protect against such attacks. AI was noted as a key driver of IT infrastructure priorities as well, as IT leaders are increasingly tasked to leverage AI solutions to improve decision-making and enhance customer experiences.
Nutanix said this evolution reflects the strategic deployment by financial services industries of diverse cloud environments tailored for specific operational, cost, compliance, and control requirements.
Hybrid multicloud architecture’s appeal lies in its ability to offer diverse cost, billing, and deployment options, empowering digital enterprises with the flexibility to enhance application performance, bolster security, accelerate time to market, and optimise IT expenditures.
“It’s a sign of the times that hybrid multicloud adoption is set to triple as financial services users gear up for heightened cybersecurity risks as new regulatory requirements, such as the EU’s 2025 Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), go into effect — making data protection and disaster recovery a hybrid multicloud imperative,” said Lee Caswell, SVP Product & Solutions Marketing at Nutanix.
Key findings from this year’s report also show that cybersecurity remains paramount, yet emphasis on AI Investment and managing overall costs sit closely behind. Half of the respondents reported that their organisations required a few days or a few weeks to fully restore operations following a cybersecurity incident.
Another 12% said that while operations were mostly restored within a few days or weeks, the impact of the attack on the enterprise lasted beyond the restoration of daily operations.
As hybrid multicloud environments grow, so are infrastructure and workloads. Cloud (78%), data and AI (77%), and ransomware protection (77%) are seeing significant growth.
The largest projected increases in IT budgets are for AI (39%), followed by ransomware prevention (34%) and IT modernisation (30%).
Overall, 78% of respondents intend to boost spending on cloud computing, with 77% planning increases for AI and ransomware protection.
For financial service companies selecting cloud services (private, hybrid, or public), flexibility, security, and data capabilities have consistently been key criteria this year and last.
In addition, the desire to improve data access performance, security, and regulatory compliance are why financial enterprises relocate applications to a different infrastructure.
Nearly all (97%) respondents in the financial services sector and 95% globally said they had moved one or more applications to a different IT infrastructure in the past 12 months, creating a need for simple and flexible inter-cloud workload and application portability.
Application movement in financial services was motivated most often by a desire to enhance performance/data access speeds (42%), followed by improving security and regulatory compliance (41%).
Further, the top-ranked challenges in financial services IT departments are cyber and compliance related. Among financial services respondents, ransomware prevention/data security and adherence to data storage/usage mandates, like DORA, were both cited as the top data management challenges today, each by 19% of respondents.
