There’s More in the Cloud: The Importance of Cloud Banking for your Financial Institution
In just over a decade’s time we have seen, and maybe even ourselves participated in, the major shift toward the decentralization of data storage, such that “in the cloud” is now a household term for many, if not most. Though initially viewed with cautious optimism, the mass migration to cloud hosting has been driven by the indisputable advantages it can offer to financial institutions.
Among the early and most recognized benefits of cloud storage solutions, the decentralization of data itself lends significantly to the stability and reliability of an organization’s infrastructure. Be it seasonal weather disasters, power outages or any other surprises that would otherwise bring down a bank or credit union’s on-premise servers and disrupt service, top-tier cloud solutions like those offered by Alogent rely on built-in redundancies and remote backup locations to eliminate threats to up time and ensure reliable 24/7 delivery of any given FI’s services.
Taking an institution’s data out-of-house can offer much more than just the reassurance of disaster resiliency, however. Today’s organizations stand to benefit from a little digital house cleaning, and a forward looking cloud hosting solution should actively promote keeping things orderly by delivering data consistency across branches and their numerous workstations. A purpose-built solution for FI’s, such as that offered by Alogent, further extends the same consistency to the usually redundant and costly process of updating and patching workstations, ensuring dramatic cost savings for the FI.
Additionally, by transitioning to a purpose-built cloud solution, a bank or credit union can reduce their hosting hardware requirements and downsize the specialized (read: costly) teams required to maintain them. When additional resources do become necessary, scaling is made effortless and instantaneous without interruptions to service. This streamlining can quickly help financial institutions to free up technical budgets that are increasingly stretched thin, offsetting the cost of the solution while at the same time allowing the FI to devote more focus to their core business.
Security, both physical and digital, tends to be an especially hot-button issue in today’s era of data breaches making near quarterly headlines. If this is true for the many multinational behemoths at the center of the more notable hacks, then doubly so for today’s financial institutions, bound by compliance regulations on one side and their public reputation on the other. And ever more so again for community banks and credit unions that lack the resources to stay ahead of ever evolving threats. Specialized cloud storage solutions for financial services often have higher levels of security certifications than those available or affordable to most community FI’s, greatly increasing the security guarantees of crucial data and member or customer trust.
Perhaps the most valuable and most recently exploited benefit, however, lies within the information itself. Hardly a secret, data is widely seen as one of the most increasingly valuable assets today, meaning that the ability to leverage that data could not only drive greater profitability, it often also enables gathering of business and operational intelligence across the institution. Advanced cloud hosting and processing solutions should do more than just support value-creating analytic opportunities; they can add further value by downsizing of redundant hardware and software needs, allowing staff to harvest data from across the institution’s branches, all from a centralized point.
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