The Synergy of Digitalization and Cloud Adoption: Transform­ing Data Management

The convergence of digitalization and cloud adoption is in the midst of reshaping industries. Businesses are experiencing an explosion of data demands and need agile solutions, as they recognize the necessity of cloud adoption for successful digital transformation.

Yet how can firms best ensure that cloud technology addresses the challenges posed by digital transformation?

The Challenges of Digital Transformation

While data has always been crucial to the financial services industry, in this era of digitalization, the push towards sourcing, maintaining and analyzing an increasing amount of data is being driven by both regulatory reasons and business opportunities. Investment managers, asset managers, banks and treasurers all have an interest in quickly accessing and analyzing market data to find sources of alpha.

Today, the world of data analytics has turned a corner with the advent of cloud-based data solutions that revolve around the concept of sharing data, rather than moving data. Taking advantage of almost unlimited cloud storage and cloud performance, cloud data warehouses can be built on the equivalent of cloud ‘lego bricks’, ultimately delivering cloud-native products.

The original cloud data warehouse solutions lacked flexibility and scalability due to the prerequisite of having to pre-determine how much data would be used, the frequency of use, and the type of network deployed. For those organizations that chose to create their own data warehouse based on the principle of sharing data with others, they now face the same set of questions as listed above, along with additional security considerations.

To help alleviate these data challenges, new cloud-based technologies were introduced. These new data warehouses, built directly on the cloud, can host extremely large datasets from various sources in one common drive, which can then be shared and simultaneously accessed by all users. The big names providing these solutions are Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Azure Synapse Analytics and Google's BigQuery.

Benefits of Cloud Data Solutions

There are a number of benefits to these new types of cloud data solutions:

• Efficient Data Sharing: Because it is cheap to store data in the cloud and you only have to pay when using the data, the concept of sharing data has been made much easier. For example, third-party datasets can be bought from vendors and multiple parties - banks, asset managers and treasuries can all use the same data set but pay and use different compute power. This means a small asset manager is now able to query the same data as a major Tier 1 bank.
• Optimisation and Scalability: Cloud computing offers cost optimisation because it is much easier to know how much it costs to host a system by a cloud provider, rather than for on-premises. The cloud also provides scalability and speed because new servers can be added when required, yet without the need to dedicate resources to monitor system performance, allowing organizations to focus on core business functions.
• Business Opportunities: Cloud architecture opens new commercial possibilities, including potential business partnerships around shared common datasets. Rather than businesses each having to build their own dataset, they would all benefit from one source and solution, with each ensuring quality and content of the information and, in the case of asset managers, removing the need for transferring and reconciling the data.
• Data Security and Governance: Data security and confidentiality are at the top of the agenda for most businesses – knowing where data is, how it is mirrored and backed up is critical for maintaining a firm’s reputation and preventing data breaches. The jurisdiction in which the business operates is also a factor, given the varying legislative requirements regarding data privacy and protection. Cloud solutions implement robust data governance for integrity and security. It is important for firms to understand that when they make the critical decision to migrate to the Cloud, they will still retain ownership of their data, just not the hardware behind it.

Careful analysis needed

More and more, cloud adoption is being seen as essential for businesses navigating the digital transformation landscape, offering efficient data management, security, agility and scalability. Because cloud data storage delivers a higher degree of data integrity, financial services are now able to make better informed decisions, with confidence.

Successful adoption, however, requires careful analysis of potential deployment and optimisation considerations. Businesses need to ensure they pick the right partners to accompany them on their cloud migration journeys. Although the initial stages of migration may take a while, they need to remember they are paving the way for the future.

Hosting OmniFi in the Cloud with SkySparc

To enable our clients to achieve all the benefits of Cloud hosting while avoiding all the potential deployment and optimization problems, we created our OmniFi Cloud SaaS solution.

SkySparc's fully outsourced OmniFi Cloud solution enables clients to access all the features and functions of OmniFi they rely on daily, with the benefits of Cloud hosting.

Working with SkySparc to migrate and run OmniFi on the Cloud reduces the need for on-premises hosting and internal expertise and, therefore, costs. In addition, with Cloud hosting, clients benefit from remote maintenance and automatic access to the latest version of OmniFi, with complete security and controls.

Our highly experienced team sidestep any potential pitfalls during deployment. Further, we work closely with our clients to optimize the ongoing use of OmniFi in the Cloud.

Contact us to find out more about SkySparc’s Omnifi Cloud SaaS solution.

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