What's driving the change

 

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Banking and Financial Markets industry data is growing exponentially. Flexibility and adoption play a critical role in building a successful plan to address this growth. As more workloads are evaluated for cloud, Banks and Financial Institutions must now consider technical issues regarding such initiatives, as well as how the cloud will change their IT and Facilities workloads. Similarly, projecting both future cloud costs and changes in internal costs, are critical to making informed strategic decisions.
 
Some challenges that Banks and Financial Institutions will be facing include:

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• Significant Operations challenges from the Covid-19 experience: Need for options in data center resiliency, different types of partnerships needed to “keep the lights on”.

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• GSIB (Global Systemic Important Bank) Indicators.

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• Aging Data Centers (more than 10,15, 20 years). Understanding how to maintain the existing facility and plan for the future. Spiraling costs for modernization of owned/on-premise data centers are forcing a new strategy.

 

• Significant data center over-building / leasing for the last 10 years: IT Architecture changes have decreased footprint, increased power density.

 

• Bank 2030: Accelerate the transition to a low carbon economy. Sustainability strategies to reduce the carbon footprint, water usage, and energy consumption to meet the Sustainable Development Goal.

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• Early cloud programs somewhat successful: A More mature approach is needed but will grow as a data center source, the cost analysis more complex than originally determined, Integration into application flexibility, deployment, and Edge services poses an increasing security issue. Consolidation has challenges: Global regulatory compliance, audit, and tax issues as a result of any strategy, topology effect on network performance and cost, migration process poses risk, cost and security issues, disposition of owned properties can be difficult, capturing the true total cost of change is complex.

 

• The rapid growth in deployment of 5G mobile networks will exponentially increase the demand for data and customer experience/responsiveness within mobile banking and investment applications. This will complicate consolidation and multi-cloud deployments and increase the potential demand for edge connectivity data centers to service that demand. This adds another complex layer to the data center strategy. 

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• Cybercrime may be the single most critical issue of this decade: Reduction in attack surface area is important. Change in, and decentralization of, IT assets and Application / Data Warehouse deployment can have positive disruption benefit to your attack profile. Select partners with additional skills and monitoring to complement in-house InfoSec layers.

 

• Big Data, AI, and sophisticated analytics requirements create a different overall IT and data center sourcing architecture need.

 

Lastly, we also understand that today’s focus for financial institutions is driven more by operational resiliency  -- and less on recovery – with the intent on not having to recover at all due to the systemic effects and ramifications a banking outage can cause across not just the financial sector, but across a multitude of other sectors that are dependent on those banks for payments processing and other areas.  
 
With the right data center sourcing and multi-cloud strategy, you will obtain a deeper understanding of the latency limits, as well as the tolerance for downtime for each application in the Banking and Financial environment.  During the strategy process, we take an application-centric approach to evaluate customer applications to understand both their technical readiness factors for the cloud and application dependencies and underlying infrastructure.  These are both crucial elements for planning and implementing a cloud migration and understanding its costs and impact on the facilities side of the data center strategy.

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How can you meet these requirements?

 

To meet the requirements of an evolving data center strategy to address the above issues, it is essential to map your present state environment and understand its overall Total Cost of Ownership to develop a new strategy that gives you the ability to grow and adapt into a future state with predictable infrastructure costs.

EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll provides a distinctive solution by taking a unique hybrid-Cloud approach that evaluates critical applications to understand both their technical readiness factors for the cloud and application dependencies and underlying infrastructure.  This is coupled with an analysis of your present state data center, colocation, cloud, and SaaS environments in order to match your future state application requirements to the most effective data center sourcing topology.  

We then provide an evaluation and cost analysis of the applications running in multiple environments, as well as data center topologies, based on the current state and the output of the detailed growth modeling for each future state option. This includes hardware/software depreciation, lease cost, power, facilities building and maintenance, network, implementation, and deployment labor and services.

 

​The bottom line is that it takes more than understanding just how to plan and design a datacenter for a financial client, but a broader perspective of the industry which we possess and have built up over many years – to develop a datacenter strategy that work will work now and into the future.

 

We have worked with commercial and institutional banks continuously since our inception in the mid 1990’s. We have planned, designed or commissioned the majority of the first stand alone greenfield facilities for this sector, and have evolved to assist these organizations in developing the next generation strategies for their datacenters and IT as they look to consolidate, achieve operational savings without sacrificing availability and security, or move some compute operations to cloud/colocation environments. We help them achieve a hybrid datacenter approach of on prem and off prem through strategy work, sale leasebacks, retrofits, migrations to service providers and other approaches.    

 

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What services are included?

 

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• Evaluate client applications with automated analysis tools, efficient stakeholder interviews, and existing data capture with minimum analysis time and costs

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• Recommendations of application disposition and or transformation targets

 

• Modeling of IT inventories and future changes that can affect the data capacity requirements over time

 

• Identification of key technical and business requirements, such as tolerance for downtime, latency limits, etc.

 

• The capture of non-technical constraints and or directives which include regulations, company history/image, etc.

 

• Once all requirements over time are defined and documented, EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll will evaluate and recommend one or more alternative strategies that consider different mixes of on-premise data centers, colocation, and public cloud providers.

 

 

Case Studies