Cloud Infrastructure Challenges
It is very expensive to develop and maintain leading technology facilities. Large banks invest more than billions of dollars in technology each year, but they often only maintain basic operations, and it is even more difficult to support investments in technological innovation to gain a leading edge. The IT infrastructure department is a large data center composed of thousands of computer servers. While consuming thousands of megawatts of electricity, it requires a large number of design, construction and operation technicians. It is large in scale and expensive. However, all the expenses of IT infrastructure operation and maintenance have failed to help the banking business department generate direct and rapid benefits in developing software and services. Today, the leading banks are also beginning to seek solutions from larger cloud service providers.
Regional banks are constrained by their own scale and development speed, which limits their overall IT expenditures and "operation and upgrade" investment budgets, further leading to aging software and hardware, making it difficult to adopt advanced information technology. Regional banks urgently need to increase investment in infrastructure services, strengthen standardized components and product levels, and shift from maintaining basic operations to investing in the future. Take advantage of the scale advantages of others instead of building in a disorderly manner. Fortunately, there is a ready-made large-scale market - the cloud service market.
Advantages of cloud services
Cloud service providers offer solutions for regional banks: by providing pre-built services with large computing and storage capacity, analytical models, built-in network features and diverse geographical cloud services, they bring strategic benefits in terms of product launch, IT efficiency, security and flexibility. When the process of starting new tasks is shortened from weeks or even months to moments, the development of potential new businesses will be realized faster.
Regional banks have their own advantages: system developers can significantly accelerate the time to market of new revenue-generating products and services; and the reduction in the cost of IT infrastructure deployment and daily management promotes operational efficiency and reduces capital expenditures.
The security and stability of data and services are critical to the reputation, legal and regulatory compliance of regional banks. Pre-certified solutions, automated control processes, secure versions and updates, encryption, and proactive threat detection provided by cloud service providers help ensure the required level of network security.
Existing cloud services
The growing number of cloud services has covered all aspects of banking business, from anti-money laundering to customer management, risk analysis and more. Cloud services have secure and reliable computing power, compliant processes, advanced analytical techniques and capabilities to provide insights, and are supported by a large application set, which can significantly reduce the cost investment, application development, maintenance and upgrades of bank IT departments.
The customer service center is equipped with virtual customer service personnel with artificial intelligence conversation capabilities, providing natural language processing services for voice-to-text conversion, as well as machine learning and AI algorithms that can improve data insights and analysis. Services like this can reduce the number of manual call processing times, reduce labor input costs, standardize service capabilities, and effectively identify and accumulate important information.
Start the journey to the cloud
Most regional banks are facing financial, regulatory and operational pressures, and accelerating cloud migration has become an important option to maintain competitiveness. How to go to the cloud requires key considerations:
Strategic target status Analyze and understand the order and necessity of migration in each link, set reasonable target status service standards, identify gaps and develop corresponding solutions. Understanding the supplier and service portfolio helps to prevent concentration risks while ensuring optimal scale and pricing. Set strategic target status in advance to ensure that the goals of the entire bank are consistent and clear, and strictly control the required human, financial and multi-project plans.
