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Introduction
The truth is, when COVID hit, the reliance on cloud to solve a cosmic number of business problems spanned across all industries.
Not only did the pandemic validate cloud’s value proposition, “the ability to use on-demand, scalable cloud models to achieve cost efficiency and business continuity is providing the impetus for organisations to rapidly accelerate their digital business transformation plans.” Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner also notes that “the increased use of public cloud services has reinforced cloud adoption to be the ‘new normal,’ now more than ever.”
According to Gartner, the aftermath of the COVID crisis will spark an acceleration of IT spending in the cloud – with cloud predicted to make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market by 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020.
Of course, cloud is not the only solution available.
In fact, there remains huge appetite to use a combination of both a public cloud and a private environment, an approach known as hybrid cloud. Adopting multiple deployment models is popular, with more than 90% of global enterprises expected to rely on hybrid cloud by 2022.
The appetite for cloud is there. The problem therein lies not in the use of cloud, but how cloud is being used.
When you consider the pace of IT and BCP decision-making since March 2020, you begin to question the longevity of solutions put in place. Are the chosen models resilient, capable of supporting changing business user and customer demands, affordable? Or do they resemble a sticking plaster, solving one problem in the moment?
If you’re unsure, or you fall into bucket two, keep reading.
Well-Architected Review designed for the cloud-era
From experience, it’s cheaper and easier to remedy if you can answer the above question sooner rather than later. This is why GlobalLogic has partnered with AWS to provide a free Well-Architected Review.
GlobalLogic has a wide range of experience helping large enterprise customers adopt Public Cloud in a safe, reliable and scalable manner. We have often found that customers aren’t always aware of the specific gaps between their environment and Cloud best practices. Where gaps are discovered, it can also take time for adjustments to be implemented because customers are sometimes nervous about making changes or don’t give them enough priority.
The Well-Architected Review provides a quick and targeted analysis based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework to help highlight specific gaps between the current state and AWS best practices.
GlobalLogic, in Partnership AWS, is offering to conduct Well-Architected Reviews for free to strategic customers and in addition, AWS is offering up to $5000 service credit per workload addressed as described below.
Why carry out a Well-Architected Review?
The AWS Well-Architected Review offering by GlobalLogic has the following benefits for customers, AWS and GlobalLogic:
What exactly is the Well-Architected Framework and Review?
The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of standards set out by AWS for benchmarking workloads and their environment in line with the following pillars:
- Operational Excellence – The ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures
- Security – The ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies
- Reliability – The ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.
- Performance Efficiency – The ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
- Cost Optimisation – The ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point.
More information about the framework can be found on the AWS website here.
The Well-Architected Review is best targeted towards a production workload which could be running in AWS, on-prem or another Cloud Provider. The review assesses the workload’s environment, operations and deployment mechanisms against those five pillars to provide detailed insight into exactly where, if any, gaps exist.
GlobalLogic use its experience and expertise to suggest practical ways in which these could be immediately improved to close the gaps in a timely and cost-effective manner.
Is the Well-Architected Review for me?
If you’re using cloud, yes.
Having launched the Well-Architected Review offering in late 2020, GlobalLogic has successfully carried out pilots in-house as well as a number of reviews for customers. These reviews provided customers with assurance in areas where they were already meeting best practices. They also highlighted areas of improvement with suggested remediation actions.
In one case, a Tier 1 Financial Services company was initially sceptical of how useful the AWS Well-Architected tool could be for them. However, once the review got going, they quickly understood the extra value GlobalLogic were bringing to the process. With our broad experience in financial services and cloud, the client was able to tap into our expertise during the review, and were particularly impressed with the backlog of remediation tasks that were generated as a result.
This backlog helped them secure quick wins and prioritise actions to ensure the most effective cloud strategy for their business, user and customer needs. They also took comfort that best practice guidelines were being met and operations were being undertaken in a secure and reliable environment.
In some cases, customers have chosen GlobalLogic to help with implementing the remediation activities which also made them eligible to receive the $5000 service credit from AWS per workload reviewed.
Next Steps
GlobalLogic is looking to scale out this free offering in 2021 and would like to invite customers to take advantage of the offer. If you have a production workload you would like reviewed, book an introductory call with a member of the team by filling out the "Let's Work Together" form below. You can also download our AWS Well-Architected Fact Sheet to learn more about how the offer works.
Privacy-enhancing computation is on the minds of many as cloud providers strive to address the security, privacy, and confidentiality of customer data. Learn how confidential computing is answering the need with technology that isolates and protects sensitive data during processing.
In this paper, you’ll learn about the Confidential Computing Consortium and it is helping expand cloud adoption in a variety of industries. You’ll also find an overview of how confidential computing works, use cases where it can help the most, and specific business cases to solve persistent issues.
“Open banking” is an initiative first launched by banking regulators in the U.K. in 2018. Major banks in the U.K. were given one year to create open interfaces between their retail (i.e., individual) and commercial (i.e., business) customers’ banking accounts and payment systems in order to make it easier to share financial information across banks, Fintechs, and third-party providers (TPPs). Leveraging APIs, authorized Fintechs and TPPs can view and analyze banking customer data (e.g., expense patterns, loan history, etc.) and then use various technology levers to present these customers with tailored financial products.
The ultimate goal of this initiative is to ease financial information sharing among financial stakeholders (with the client’s consent) and to encourage banks to collaborate with Fintechs and TPPs instead of competing with them.
Global Adoption
Since its launch on January 13, 2018, open banking has been rapidly adopted across the U.K.:
- 300 Fintechs and innovative providers have joined the ecosystem1
- 2.5+ million U.K. consumers and businesses now use open banking-enabled products1
- Every month, hundreds of thousands of U.K. consumers and businesses become new active open banking users1
- API call volume has increased from 66.8 million in 2018 to nearly 6 billion in 20201
Now global markets beyond the U.K. are beginning to adopt open banking. Not only will it lead to faster financial services innovation, it will also open up competition — leading to a transparent financial market and enabling clients to make the right decision at the right time for their financial goals. This step further reduces the barrier of entry for the neo banks, Fintechs, and startups to enter the banking industry — along with getting the incumbent banks to modernize their infrastructure to address the new era of banking.
Of course, in order to successfully implement open banking and create a seamlessly functioning ecosystem, the right stakeholder and technology levers must be in-place and in-sync. In the next two sections, I will briefly describe each of these moving pieces.
Ecosystem Players
Banking Regulators
In the U.K., the open banking initiative is overseen by the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE); governed by the Competitions and Market Authority (CMA); and funded by the U.K.’s nine largest banks and building societies3. In other countries like the U.S., China, Singapore, Australia, and Canada, regulators act as the primary stakeholder to normalize open banking and enable a safe and secure setup for banking customers.
Major Banks & TPPs/FinTechs
Open banking has got off to a good start with major banks, and I expect the trend to continue growing since it provides a much more open playing field for ecosystem partners to operate and collaborate for customer engagements. For example, BBVA has launched a BaaS platform called Open Platform; HSBC has launched a Connected Money app; and Barclays has enabled account aggregation inside its mobile banking app2. On the other end, TPPs and Fintechs are trying to leverage various technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data to proactively offer customized solutions for clients.
Retail & SMB Banking Customers
Open banking also benefits banking customers (retail, SMB and commercial) customers by providing them with access to multiple personal finance management (PFMs) tools/vendors and a consolidated interface for financial transactions. Of course, the customer has sole authority over their financial data. Customers must authorize their bank to share their data with TPPs and Fintechs, and they can decide how long a TPP or Fintech has access to their data. The customer gets to choose banking products per their needs — whether that’s a product from their incumbent bank or a TPP/Fintech — and their private banking credentials cannot be disclosed, stored, or retained.
Technology Levers
Banking API
To achieve the level of transparency and security required for open banking, banks must update their legacy infrastructures to support open APIs, which is what enables TPPs and FinTechs to view and analyze the banks’ client account information. As mentioned earlier, banks must first get permission from their customers about how to manage their information. In return, the banks use various tools and technologies to monitor customer data and leverage it to enhance their offerings across loans, insurance, financial services, etc.
Data Privacy and Security
Data privacy and security are the most important tenets of open banking. Financial regulators have deliberated data privacy and security heavily, which can change depending on the geography and banking standards. Banking clients must be able to trust that banks will share only what they want, for how long they want, with authorized TPPs and FinTechs who will also protect their information. They must also feel secure that their data will not be leaked through hacks or leaks during the transmission between banks and TPPs/FinTechs, which is why these institutions must harden their security measures by using various steps like data encryption, no retention policies, system firewalls, etc.
Conclusion
GlobalLogic has been working within the BFSI industry for over 15 years, helping financial services institutions of all types adopt digital transformation, from UX and architecture advisory to full-service product engineering. Our expertise includes:
- Open banking & PSD/2 implementation
- Enterprise application integration
- API management programs
- Architecture assessment & reference (API & integration)
- iPaaS advisory & implementation
- Master data management & synchronization across the enterprise
- Business process & workflow automation
- Cloud & on-premise platforms
Based on this experience, I expect that open banking will continue to evolve with new standards and measures as countries customize this initiative to create an easier-to-use banking platform. Customer adoption will also likely increase multi-fold as we move towards a hardened, secure, and validated open banking ecosystem. Not only will open banking provide transparency across the banking ecosystem, but it will provide banking customers with more choices in financial products and vendors than ever before.