Migrating workloads to a new business architecture is a need and no longer a choice.

IT infrastructure today has evolved as one of the core pillars, defining success as organisations look at market platforms, powered by exponential technologies like Hybrid Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance customer service and drive growth.  It acts as a strong foundation, helping organisations achieve efficiency, productivity, performance to run data-intensive workloads, and security on the move. More importantly, the success of technologies like Hybrid Cloud, AI, Blockchain and security are dependent on the strength of the infrastructure backbone - servers, storage, and software - to power an organization’s current and future business requirements.

Financial Services Sector leads by example:

While the majority of industries acknowledge the importance of a strong infrastructure play… the Financial Services Sector (FSS) has taken the lead. Organisations in FSS are ahead of the curve in their digital transformation journeys and have been undergoing phenomenal transformation. They are building new digital capabilities to sustain, grow and compete by revamping and upgrading to newer technology platforms associated with infrastructure, applications, processes, data, and customer engagement. According to the IBM Institute for Business Value Study - Banking on open hybrid multi-cloud, almost 91 per cent of financial institutions are actively using cloud services today or plan to use them in the next six to nine months—double the number four years ago.

We are witnessing this shift in the India market in a big way, and I can state this with conviction because, 11 out of 13 public sector banks today are running their mission-critical workloads on IBM Power Systems. With the Government of India announcing the amalgamation of 10 public sector banks into 4 megabanks, the banks had to refresh their compute and storage capacity to address the increased transaction load and enhance customer experience. Of these 4 resultant entities, three public sector banks are running their core banking systems and all four banks run their mission-critical workloads on IBM Power Systems.

Globally, banks are leveraging  IBM Cloud for Financial Services™,  cloud designed to build trust and enable a transparent public cloud ecosystem with the specific features for security, compliance and resiliency that financial institutions require. Banks can confidently host their mission-critical applications and integrate security into every phase of the cloud journey. By moving to a cloud platform, financial institutions can effectively capitalize on newer innovations and deliver more personalized customer experiences while managing stringent industry regulations for sensitive data and complex workloads. The IBM Cloud for Financial Services, now supporting Red Hat OpenShift and other cloud-native services, is generally available and backed by EY, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and a growing ecosystem of more than 90 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers.

Pivot to a Platform with Customer-centricity at the core

Another factor that is prompting organisations to rethink and reimagine their infrastructural architecture is their need for agility to meet the dynamic customer requirements and engage with them on their terms and at their pace. With customers at the core of decision making and business success, organisations are tuning into new digital capabilities that can support new-age services. They are upgrading their traditional systems to support ecosystem engagement around intelligent workflows. AI-powered processes and API-fication are taking a lead where functionality and data is offered as a service. This is where the power of Hybrid acts as a key differentiator. Allowing workloads to run on multiple platforms in multiple interoperable environments, an open hybrid multi-cloud architecture enables portability of workflows and data accessibility, underpinned by enterprise grade security.

Forging ahead

Considering the rapid digital adoption, in the next two to three years, automation and hybrid cloud will become more integral to all sectors. The security, scalability, agility, and speed available through a cloud-enabled infrastructure can better equip an organization to be agile, rapidly make adjustments and respond to market changes. In the age of digital transformation, protecting data on-prem and in the cloud through encryption ensures sensitive data is secure and private. 

To reap the benefits of the digital transformation wave, data analytics and AI are key to the businesses of tomorrow. With the right roadmap, all sectors can make the necessary move to an open hybrid multi-cloud environment, transforming themselves into an agile organization fuelled with data and guided by AI insights.

This article is authored by Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India/South Asia