In financial services, data is essential for storing product information, capturing customer details, processing transactions and keeping records of accounts; the relationship between products and their underlying data has always been symbiotic. A significant amount of data infrastructure is static, fragmented across data silos or based on legacy platforms. This has created an impedance mismatch between products and the underlying data.
Enterprises are quickly evolving from a posture that approached the cloud as a kind of playground to one that goes all in to achieve cloud-first, cloud-native IT. With this transition from free-for-all to mature-business-service architecture, usually involving multiple public cloud providers, comes the need to answer some thorny questions. It’s no longer sufficient to endlessly pile on additional cloud services to a growing hybrid or distributed cloud infrastructure.
The thing about data is there’s no end to how much of it you can collect and keep. Each day, if you’re like most of the global banks I work with, you’re generating oceans of the stuff. Yet the bulk of it will never be very helpful or even relevant to your day-to-day business decisions.
Companies have had only mixed results in their decades-long quest to make better decisions by harnessing enterprise data. But as a new generation of technologies make it easier than ever to unlock the value of business information, change is coming. We’ve already reaped gains at Hitachi Vantara, where I run a global IT team that supports 11,000 employees and helps more than 10,000 customers rapidly scale digital businesses.
I’m starting to hear questions like: “What comes next?” “Do things go back to the way they were?” “Are some of the changes wrought by the pandemic here to stay?” I think we all know part of the answer: there is no going (all the way) back. In the analog world, sure, we need some things to revert to bounce back. We need to revitalize retail, tourism and hospitality to get our economies moving again.
Automation will fail to achieve most of its potential if treated as a specialty, single-function tool applied only to accelerate narrow parts of business processes. In most industries, financial services included, automation done properly is a journey that delivers a steady stream of benefits resulting from building a broader and increasingly powerful multilayered stack of automated processes and analytics.
When digital disruption first hit the finance and investment markets, it seemed to signal the death knell for the traditional banks and financial institutions. For a time, it looked as though the best-known brands were doomed to become utilities: only good for basic financial transactions, weighed down by legacy processes and technologies, and viewed as little more than digital dinosaurs.
Large-scale, sophisticated attacks like the SolarWinds cyber intrusion and the Microsoft Exchange Server hack are disturbing, to say the least. These are more than just bad headlines; they reflect fundamental, systemic problems with the security postures in most enterprises. One underreported issue is the continued adherence of organizations to principles that maintain strong perimeter controls to prevent things outside from coming in.
It seems like only yesterday that the cloud was considered the destination. For technology decision-makers, choices boiled down to: “Do I want this thing in my data center, or would it be better, cheaper and faster in the cloud?” The cloud was the place to be.
Last month, we were proud to launch our Hitachi Kubernetes Service, a true storage-as-a-service (SaaS) offering to improve the performance and management of multiple Kubernetes environments. By enabling users to manage their clusters simply and securely across any major cloud provider and on premises, Kubernetes can play an instrumental role in businesses’ modernization efforts. It’s for this reason that we are always working to get it on the radar of our existing clients.
