Hybrid Cloud to Compete
It’s fair to say that the benefits of the cloud haven’t been lost on financial services organizations. In fact, according to a 2020 IDC report, more than half of banks (57 percent) were already operating in cloud environments — and most of the remainder (another 40 percent) had plans to within the next two years2
Why? Public cloud provides unmatched flexibility and scalability. But not every workload is suitable for the public cloud, and in few industries is that more apparent than in financial services where significant issues prevent complete adoption:
Data sovereignty and regulatory requirements around data privacy limit where specific data and workloads can reside.
Data security and fraud growth. For example, synthetic identity fraud — the use of a combination of real and fake information to create a fraudulent identity — resulted in $968 million in credit card losses in 2018 and was projected to reach $1.26 billion in 20203
Public cloud can become costly, with data egress fees quickly adding up when dealing with the massive amount of data many financial institutions are working with.
Interdependence between legacy and modern applications that will result in performance degradation or latency issues.
Some enterprise workloads simply must reside on-premises. The solution is a hybrid cloud environment, combining public, private, and on-premises edge environments where it makes the best sense for control, management, performance, and resiliency. This is both a technology shift, and a cultural one — hybrid cloud is a dramatic change to the organization’s people, processes, and technology, requiring highly specialized (and hard to procure) expertise and a new mindset.
CBTS and HPE Pointnext Services
One way of overcoming the challenge of specialized expertise needed for services across both public and private clouds is to get help. Advisory and professional services, like those from CBTS and HPE Pointnext Services, can use proven frameworks and methodologies that help guide your modernization efforts to success.
HPE Pointnext Services is an organization designed to help customers adopt hybrid IT, and CBTS has more than two decades of history in helping financial services organizations use technology to modernize their businesses. Together they can tailor a digital strategy and implementation specific to financial services businesses, as well as provide insight on how to refine and optimize the hybrid environment.
3
Virtualize for agility and flexibility
Another tool in the technology kit for financial services organizations seeking the flexibility needed to meet evolving market needs is to virtualize everything from desktops to the network environment itself.
Particularly, virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI) can help organizations confidently support the flexibility required for employees who need to work from home, the office, trading floor, customer premise, or anywhere — securely, with the high performance needed.
The right VDI solutions for financial services
In collaboration with the leaders in compute and virtualization — Intel, Citrix, and VMware — HPE offers a portfolio of VDI solutions that meet the strict security and compliance requirements of banking and financial services (as well as other highly regulated environments). Thanks to that, financial services companies can adopt the virtual desktop technologies they need to provide workplace flexibility, improve space utilization, and even reduce carbon emissions (by up to 50 percent!) through more efficient infrastructure.
Jointly developed VDI solutions from HPE and Intel provide resources with seamless access to critical work applications whether they reside on-premises or in the cloud — with the high levels of performance and security needed for financial services. HPE Client Virtualization with VMWare Horizon View is designed for mid-size organizations needing secure and straightforward virtualization. HPE Client Virtualization with Citrix Workspace supports a wide range of business-critical applications using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop (CVAD), part of an overall Citrix Workspace solution.
And through HPE GreenLake, your organization’s flexible VDI-enabled digital workplace can be delivered as-a-service — anywhere.
Industry challenges overcome through VDI
As financial industry organizations implement flexible work that includes mobile and on-site activities, they must contend with several challenges that traditional infrastructure can’t keep up with. VDI solutions, like those from HPE, help address the need to:
• Support rising numbers of remote workers — across multiple locations
• Boost productivity through secure collaboration
• Achieve faster time to market with new products and services
• Simplify operational complexity, while deploying infrastructure that meets escalating needs
• Meet compliance requirements to keep data secure and backed up
• Ensure performance and availability of critical applications to complete lag-free transactions in real time
4
Everything as a Service
While hybrid cloud is already being adopted by banks and other financial services organizations at a fast pace, many are beginning to recognize the benefit of as-aservice delivery of software, infrastructure, and more.
We’ve already mentioned how HPE is offering VDI as a service through HPE GreenLake. With HPE GreenLake for VDI, financial institutions can choose from several offerings each that meet specific roles or needs, such as traditional VDI for line-level employees, or high-performance “bare metal” VDI for power users like traders.
For payment systems, often one of the more legacy systems that organizations have, HPE GreenLake is game-changing. HPE GreenLake for Payments is a novel new payment platform (again, delivered as a service) that provides high performance, always-on capabilities, highly strict security, and is built for future growth and evolution. It’s designed to scale rapidly, but also to keep every transaction and piece of sensitive data secure and compliant with industry standards.
With HPE GreenLake for Payments, data is kept on-premises or co-located, so performance concerns around the public cloud are never an issue. Nor is compliance, since HPE GreenLake remains in the organization’s own data center, under its control.
But it isn’t just software and infrastructure financial services are looking at to gain competitive advantage. HPE has a unique platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution optimized for Splunk analytics, aptly named HPE GreenLake for Splunk. With this solution, HPE provides workload-optimized infrastructure for Splunk indexing that eliminates input/output (I/O) bottlenecks. In addition, through the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, HPE GreenLake for Splunk can be scaled at only a fraction of the cost. This all allows financial services organizations to get more value out of their existing Splunk investments — reducing their infrastructure footprint by as much as 17 times , while having advanced visibility into critical operations4
Since the whole platform — including servers, storage, and containerization — is fully managed by HPE as a service, financial institutions gain the ability to index, store and analyze the vast amounts of data they consume more easily, with improved access, greater resiliency, and with economy of scale.
Your team in modernization
Through consumption-based, as-a-service solutions, a strong VDI portfolio, and expert advice and services, HPE and CBTS are your partners in transforming to a modern financial services organization, providing virtual customer services and supporting a flexible mobile workforce — whenever and wherever they are needed. We do the “heavy lifting”, so our financial services customers can focus on supporting their customers and innovating to win.
5
What’s HPE GreenLake?
HPE GreenLake is a consumption-based approach to IT with a platform that lets apps and data reside on the cloud, at the edge, or in-house, so financial organizations have the control and performance they need while being able to take advantage of the cloud’s agility and economy.
With HPE GreenLake, on-premises gear is procured as a managed solution with pay-asyou-go pricing, just like it was virtualized in the cloud. Then, everything is managed from a centralized location, reducing the complexity that hybrid environments are famous for.
Equipment is installed when needed by HPE or a partner like CBTS, with reserve capacity for future growth, and organizations pay only for what is used. That way the organization can scale up or down rapidly as the market demands, and, thanks to advanced forecasting abilities, customers are positioned for future needs.
About HPE
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) is the global edge-to-cloud company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere.
Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way people live and work, HPE delivers unique, open and intelligent technology solutions as a service. With offerings spanning Cloud Services, Compute, High Performance Computing & AI, Intelligent Edge, Software, and Storage, HPE provides a consistent experience across all clouds and edges, helping customers develop new business models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance. For more information, visit:
About CBTS
At the Platinum partnership program level, CBTS is one of the most trusted and competent organizations in the HPE ecosystem. Together we focus on the complexities of your business and the needs of your customers to ensure you have all the tools you need to tackle today’s disruptive threats and achieve your desired business outcomes. For more information visit:
1 Heath P. Terry, Debra Schwartz, and Tina Sun, “The Future of Finance: The Socialization of Finance, Part 3,” Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research, 2015
2 IDC report, August 2020
3 Identity Fraud: The Elephant in the Room,” 2018
4 Based on Splunk, Intel®, and HPE testing conducted in August 2020 with up to 12 indexers per host. Results may vary.
