Cloud adoption is on the rise in the highly regulated world of finance and insurance organisations
A quantitative research study was recently conducted with UK and Ireland IT decision makers (ITDMs) of Finance and Insurance organisations.
The study explored how Finance and Insurance organisations are approaching cloud adoption, where the key challenges and apprehensions exist, and how they can look to overcome these challenges through making improvements to their approaches to data management and data protection.
The full report can be downloaded here, however, a summary of some the findings is detailed below.
As most organisations will know, the growing use of cloud is not expected to slow any time soon. The referenced survey estimates that approaching half (48%) of the data in their organisation is stored or managed in the public cloud at present, and that this figure is expected to rise quite considerably to 78% in five years’ time.
Considering the vast quantities of data that modern organisations will be managing, this represents a huge cloud undertaking. In addition, as organisations are increasingly working across multiple cloud deployments, their management and protection of this data becomes ever more complex.
Almost all (96%) respondents point to at least one concern that relates to cloud-based deployments, with over half (52%) indicating that risk of non-compliance with regulations is one of the greatest challenges facing this specific industry.
This stance is further reinforced by around nine in ten (89%) respondents agreeing that legislation and regulation makes data management more challenging for their organisation. In fact, for 19%, data management is considered far more challenging. In the context of highly regulated industries in particular, this is a worrying thought. One misstep in terms of regulatory compliance could bring with it a sizeable financial hit.
As an example, consider subject access requests (SARs) since the introduction of GDPR in 2018. An overwhelming majority (98%) of respondents’ organisations have a formalised process for managing SARs, but for 86% this process is at least partially manual. It’s therefore no real surprise to see almost all (95%) respondents admitting that their organisation could improve its approach to managing and processing these. For enterprise organisations, the amount of time and resource that may be being spent on fulfilling these kind of regulatory requests – SARs and otherwise – is considerable. In all likelihood, it’s time and resource that could be being spent much more effectively elsewhere in the organisation.
As far as areas where there is room for improvement in terms of managing and processing SARs, respondents are most likely to place speed (84%), scalability (76%), and visibility throughout the process (74%) in their top five. It begs the question: would better data management infrastructure enable organisations to deal with regulatory requirements more effectively with these key drivers in mind?
Organisations do not have a choice around whether they comply with regulations, and the punitive fines if they do not do so can be crippling for a business. It’s therefore highly important that they employ processes and solutions that make their data management as effective as possible, even in cloud environments.
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This blog is an extract from the research paper, “Data Management in a Multi-Cloud World: Finance and Insurance Edition”. To read the full paper, you can download it here.
Data Management in a Multi-Cloud World: Finance and Insurance Edition