Cloud

What EY can do for you

The benefits of cloud technology can’t be contested. It’s less expensive, easier to use and in many ways, safer than private data centers. In addition to its benefits, cloud technology helps solve some of the most pressing concerns of financial institutions, including:

• Creating digital platforms that attract customers
• Making use of data in the best way possible
• Seamlessly joining the financial services ecosystem
• Securely connecting with vendors, employees and customers
• Achieving scalability, and innovating while reducing costs
• Bringing internal business and technology teams together

Cloud adoption is the backbone of digital innovation. It gives organizations access to on-demand resources—such as networks, servers, storage, applications and services—that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management or service provider interaction.

Platform thinking is at the core of EY cloud strategy

EY teams help you re-think business processes and operating models, through cloud-enabled platforms, emerging technologies and generation-skipping transformation.

Platform thinking gives organizations an opportunity to consolidate their capabilities within a broader digital strategy. Firms can then create new experiences and provide customers, vendors, and employees with innovative products and services.

Boards, senior management, Chief Digital Officers and other key executives will have to address four key considerations when moving to the cloud:

1. Manage risks along the cloud transformation journey

The question for financial organizations now is how to migrate to the cloud securely. IoT, machine learning and AI are driving faster cloud adoption, but are also increasing risk management concerns including security, compliance, cybersecurity and resiliency. Third-party providers offer pre-built solutions, but these often come with additional risk considerations.

Financial institutions must make security, compliance, cybersecurity and resiliency their top priorities while making all efforts to remain competitive. Companies need to assess their existing technologies through an evolving risk and compliance lens while ensuring that controls and governance are in place and accessible.

Risk integration must take place early during any agile product development and processes. This brings risk efficiencies with cloud consumption and helps ensure that cloud-related risk processes and methodologies are performed in alignment with prescribed enterprise risk standards.

2. Consider cost improvization and legacy transformation

Cloud solutions allow financial institutions to modernize their operations and truly adopt all aspects of digital transformation, including a key component – platform thinking. Doing so increases the efficiency of IT spend, while improving customer and employee experiences.

During an application portfolio assessment, financial services firms have the opportunity to rethink how their business services relate to technology. Should they take advantage of cloud-native technologies during the migration or simply move to a “lift and shift” strategy?

EY teams help the clients align their business strategy with operating models by prioritizing when and where to modernize their legacy systems, processes and operations through cloud-enabled platforms and emerging technologies.

3. Deliver enterprise cloud transformation and governance

Despite being aware of all the benefits of migrating to the cloud, a fundamental issue remains for financial services leaders: people and organizational change management can be difficult.

To identify changes that need to be made, we conduct a risk and benefit analysis based on portfolios to help determine operational feasibility of migrating. This leads to reduced setup and management efforts and increased performance and reliability.

In addition to performing the risk/benefit analysis, we coach EY clients on how to build training programs that elevate their employees’ skills related to cloud infrastructure. This upskilling not only gives employees confidence, but also helps carry out a smoother enterprise transition.

4. Embrace innovation and disruption

Migrating to the cloud gives companies access to more data power, which enables digital transformation at every level. As data points proliferate, financial institutions will inevitably need the power of the cloud to crunch data, make decisions and provide customer service that matches their competitors.

Instead of waiting, financial institutions need to not only start migrating, but also experimenting in the cloud. Many small- to mid-size companies have had the benefit of starting in the cloud, which is leading to a seamless customer experience for them and is threatening legacy companies. It is time for large players to join the cloud so they can test new platforms and concepts, stay current – and even get ahead of the curve.