Automation to Manage Financial Services IT Infrastructure in the Multicloud Era

In the vast majority of industries, the first concerns about migrating data to the Cloud started years ago. As a result, we've seen a widespread shift to Multicloud architectures over the past decade as organizations learn to navigate this technology in search of more agility to keep up with both rising customer expectations and the demands of their rapidly changing markets.  

For highly regulated financial services companies, however, this is a different reality. Only recently have the benefits of the Cloud begun to outweigh the security and integrity arguments it used to keep its operations' many workloads on-premises. Only recently, then, have we been able to witness an accelerated shift in the IT departments of banks and insurance companies to the Cloud. 

Today, given the variety of services on the market, most of these organizations use more than one platform and have workloads distributed across multiple environments. These Multicloud strategies, with multiple Clouds being combined, provide the agility and scalability that finance companies need to stay ahead, innovate faster and continuously optimize. 

While it is true that choosing multiple platforms offers financial organizations greater flexibility (to perform different tasks, for example), it is also true that each Cloud implemented in a Multicloud environment equally increases complexity and adds a new source of data to monitor. In other words, this means more work for IT teams to deal with for infrastructure management (preventing these teams from focusing on innovation).  

Not by chance, figures from a recent independent survey conducted by Dynatrace show that IT specialists in financial organizations dedicate almost half of their time (42%) to manual and routine work, dedicated only to keeping the infrastructure running. 

In this context, it is imperative that IT teams have a more sustainable approach to managing environments and networks, freeing up professionals' time and energy. Time and energy, in this case, that can be reinvested in driving the digital transformation and delivering the high-quality, secure and efficient experiences that customers want. 

Indeed, having more time available for innovation is fundamental. Financial institutions are expected to keep our money safe and accessible, and that also requires them to be able to sustain and develop a constant stream of innovations. Whether customers are checking an account balance or entries, applying for a loan, or transferring money between accounts, users expect a seamless digital experience. If not, they may switch to the competition.  

To reach this level, IT teams at these financial institutions need to manage application performance effectively. They need intelligent, end-to-end observability across their multicloud environment. Unfortunately, that visibility isn't easy to achieve, as blind spots keep popping up as the infrastructure becomes more complex. 

Each new cloud platform comes with its own native monitoring solution, such as Amazon CloudWatch or Azure Monitor, which adds another source of data that IT teams must keep track of. These teams gradually found themselves with a huge array of tools that must be layered over traditional monitoring solutions to track activity across the entire IT infrastructure. 

Our research indicates that, on average, financial institutions rely on seven different monitoring solutions to manage Multicloud environments. As a result, IT departments end up being swamped with data and consequently forced to spend increasing amounts of time manually gathering insights from different dashboards to keep running efficiently and identify issues with their digital services. The strain of this task reduces the time they have to drive innovation and create business value. 

In this scenario, traditional monitoring approaches are no longer effective. After all, financial services institutions need to empower their IT teams with a smarter approach to tracking infrastructure. By leveraging AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations), teams can automate as many infrastructure management tasks as possible. This option, in turn, eliminates blind spots by continuously discovering and instrumenting multiple cloud infrastructure as the environment itself changes. As a result, employees can maintain end-to-end observability without having to invest more time and effort in manual monitoring processes. 

AIOps can also allow teams to automatically triage notifications that indicate a potential disruption to the digital experience and provide the precise insights needed to resolve issues before they impact users and customers. 

With an AIOps approach, teams can understand the root cause of any issues in their Multicloud infrastructure and prioritize them based on their anticipated business impact. This allows industry contributors to address the most critical issues first and focus their efforts on tasks that accelerate the delivery of reliable, innovative, high-quality financial services experiences. 

Financial institutions face fierce competition. Fintechs that were born in the digital world can innovate quickly, as they don't have the complexity of managing a legacy on-premises environment alongside modern Cloud platforms. More established banks and insurance companies have adopted the Multicloud infrastructure to ensure the agility needed to drive innovation. Those who do not follow will fall into oblivion. However, as financial institutions continue their transition to multi-cloud architecture, it is critical to ensure that the infrastructure runs smoothly. 

Creating continuous digital services and customer satisfaction are the main strategic goals of any organization. Adopting infrastructure monitoring strategies that leverage Artificial Intelligence and automation can help organizations achieve these goals. Reducing the burden of manual tasks on IT teams will also allow them to refocus their time and effort on projects that accelerate digital transformation, drive better business outcomes, and deliver amazing experiences. 

*Adilson Pereira, Regional Sales Director for the Financial Market at Dynatrace