A recent survey conducted by Finextra and Red Hat showed that 82% of the financial services respondents say they are embracing and implementing hybrid cloud infrastructure company-wide.

Many are now deploying open source technologies to support and enhance the inherent capabilities of a hybrid cloud infrastructure, which include agility, resilience, portability, automation, speed to market and continual testing and iterative improvements at speed in isolated, protected environments. The open hybrid cloud adds interoperability to this, and is a factor cited by leading practitioners as increasing their ability to attract developer talent.

These attributes, however, will mean very different things to different business stakeholders and will therefore be prioritised in differing orders by different business lines. Speed of development and speed-to-market will likely be of greatest importance to digital programme strategists and developers, whereas portability will be more important to someone leading system recoveries or performance outages, where operational resilience is key.

Where these priorities conflict – or complement – each other needs to be identified and communicated to the board, for a cohesive, top-down strategy to be fulfilled with a consistent approach. There will be different challenges in executing that strategy across different parts of the business - there could be gaps in knowledge, understanding or expertise, hence where these challenges lie and for whom becomes a compelling question to answer.

Overcoming different hurdles and identifying the different benefits is a key part of a strategy to fully realise the potential of cloud architectures. And all strategies need to take a long-term view – the migration from on-premise systems in bank-owned data centres to a cloud service provider and on through hybrid cloud environments is a dynamic culture shift rather than a quick decision to migrate a few workloads and reap the benefits. Financial organisations need to know and understand the value of what hybrid cloud can deliver to what part of their business and overall operations, and they need to identify the different gaps and challenges in order to achieve the required outcomes. It is no small journey or undertaking, but the benefits can be universally acknowledged as a clear incentive.

This research paper from Finextra, in association with Red Hat, is based on several interviews with senior leaders from diverse areas of the banking business to explore and understand some of the key questions around hybrid cloud.

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