There Is a Catch to the Cloud
Cloud computing is on its way to be the dominant infrastructure model and it is just getting started – but there are still hiccups to address. To address the complications, companies have to take on cloud management with Software Intelligence.
It’s a win-win. As financial institutions are seeking to utilise cloud services to provide better services for customers, they are looking to partner with fintech start-ups to accelerate innovation, clever use of digital business models or get access to talented tech engineers.
Fintechs are looking for collaboration partners to gain access to financial services and APIs to build and grow their niche products. It seems like there are endless opportunities for collaboration in the evolving world of the cloud when companies go digital.
But there is a catch. A catch that can be a deadlock to a start-up and can make cloud computing much more complex than simplifying it.
The partnerships are often established on the backbone of large and complex landscapes consisting of hundreds of applications developed for robustness and compliance and held together by a complex integration architecture. Determining where to fuse fintech services and where to carve out applications for cloud enablement is a complex and risky process. Moreover, the complexity is only going to increase in the coming years as fintech and cloud services continue to develop further if existing complexity is not addressed.
”A question that financial institutions should ask themselves is this: How do we keep the risk and quality of our business under control as we need to run through agile digital transformation processes, enabling cloud migration and fusing in more and more fintech services? Often, a fact-based approach that measures your existing systems and software is a good starting point. We call this Software Intelligence”, explains Jack Ekman, managing partner in Omnium Improvement.
Software does not have to be a black box
Business intelligence is routinely used to gather, transform and present large sets of financial data to drive fact-based decision making and risk management in the financial sector. Software Intelligence provides the same insight at the application level and can help a company assess its software systems.
Photocredit: Omnium Improvement.
By measuring software agility, software resilience and cloud-readiness and combining it with a thorough understanding of business impact, it is possible to create a fact-based quality and risk overview of complex application landscapes. It basically provides a roadmap helping management identify the right places to fuse in fintech and identify the existing applications that can be modernised and cloud-enabled.
“Many existing applications are in effect black boxes, even when seen from within the organizations that originally built them. Software Intelligence helps development teams do more with less, as they become more efficient and get a much better understanding of the software they are modifying. Also, companies approve significantly in their ability to assess risk and compliance,” says Ekman.
The result is a digital roadmap and a risk map which allows management to make the right decisions during digital transformation processes. From a fintech point of view, Software Intelligence makes it easier to find the business processes and integration points, allowing for an easier fusion of the two worlds.
“With Software Intelligence, we often see how the combination of technical insight and business impact presented at management level makes it easier and more intuitive to make fact-based decisions regarding digital transformations. Sometimes it’s almost like the data starts to speak on its own; sparking innovative decisions,” says Ekman.
