IT teams in financial services industry, who were bogged down by laborious and error prone semi-manual processes, can now manage an entire technology stack through software
By Rajesh Dhar
In today’s digital age, financial organisations are producing and processing ever-growing volumes of sensitive customer and client data. Hence, it is essential they find new ways to manage their infrastructure operations and data storage. If not, they will be unable to speed up mission critical applications, unlock digital innovation, stay ahead of the competition and mitigate risk.
IT teams in financial institutions are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the demands of both new and existing mission critical workloads, for which traditional models of storage are no longer fit for purpose. Confined and consumed with provisioning, troubleshooting and supporting infrastructure, financial IT systems currently sacrifice agility for reliability. While there are storage solutions that may be fast and reliable, but they can fall short when it comes to agility and simplicity. Hence, financial organisations require a new approach in high-end storage.
Traditionally, issues with availability arise from systems that sit above the data storage function, such as the network, server and virtualisation. Nowadays, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can allow businesses to bypass these barriers, look beyond them, and at the same time, predict and prevent any disruptions that might occur in the infrastructure stack. This reduces the amount of time that IT teams spend on bog-standard maintenance, thereby freeing up their time to focus on more value-add activities.
Moreover, when the intelligence from AI and ML is coupled with data mobility it brings a new level of functionality, so data can move across primary, secondary, and private/public cloud tiers seamlessly, securely, and cost-effectively. This enables simple cloud-based archive or disaster recovery while continuing to use on-premises infrastructure for fast, reliable operational recovery and test/dev. Such high-end storage software can also be set up in minutes, thereby streamlining workflows.
Historically, the financial services industry has dealt with laborious and error prone semi-manual processes with scripts, but now, it’s possible to automate this. It’s done by employing infrastructure-as-code, which means it’s possible to manage an entire technology stack through software. A technology like HPE’s Primera delivers instant access to data with storage that can be set up in minutes, upgrades transparently, and is distributed as-a-service. It also offers an on-demand experience which gives users the agility of the cloud. In conjunction with HPE Infosight, the industry’s most advanced AI platform for operations, it delivers significant breakthroughs and reduces time spent deploying, managing and scaling storage by up to 93 per cent. It also brings simplicity to any mission critical apps.
For the financial services industry, having this intelligent high-end storage technology means that a naturally risk adverse industry can move forward without the worries of downtime and data outages that have been an issue for years. The level of intelligence and efficiency will ultimately be passed onto the customers who now expect the speeds from their financial service providers as they do from other industries.
(The author is Senior Director – Hybrid IT, HPE India)
