Assuring Digital Transformation Success for Banks

Digital transformations in banking are nothing new, and as with so many enterprises during the COVID-19 pandemic, cloud migrations and software-as-a-service (SaaS) adoption continued to progress—and in some cases, even accelerated. However, banks have not abandoned private data centers; in fact, private data centers are still an essential piece of their IT data center strategy. As many as 57 percent of respondents to a 2020 IDC survey indicated their bank already was supporting a hybrid data center environment. Additionally, 40 percent revealed they were implementing hybrid cloud within the next 12 to 24 months. 

Regulations, data governance, control for security, and performance demands were cited as rationale for maintaining the private data center portion of their hybrid cloud environments. On-premises, co-location, and third-party private cloud data centers are all options as enterprises modernize their legacy technology data centers. What becomes quickly apparent is the gap in visibility to assure the successful operation of those transformations.  

Monitoring packet data in private data centers became the gold standard for assuring network and application performance in those infrastructures. Digital transformations with software-defined networking, virtualizations, adoption of web-based applications, SaaS/unified communications as a service (UCaaS), and third-party private cloud technologies were found to be blind spots for many IT organizations that had previously relied on packet-flow visibility. 

Digital transformations have the attention of senior IT and executive leadership in any enterprise, and even more so in banking environments, as the network has become the financial highway. Validating that the new environment is operating at expected and required levels is an essential part of every transformation plan and requires a way to measure that operation. Further, there have been countless examples of the value of using performance and usage metrics from the existing environment to help make intelligent decisions during the planning and migration phases of these projects. Undoubtedly, the before, during, and after monitoring and analysis for network and application performance assurance throughout all the phases of digital transformations helps increase their overall success.  

There are several ways IT teams are regaining visibility and control of their private data centers and hybrid cloud environments to assure success for their financial applications and services. 

Explore one bank’s approach to regaining visibility and control as it implemented a third-party private cloud data center.