Today, every sector operates in an era of great disruption, driven by digitalization and unprecedented levels of innovation:
New products and services, new business models, and new competitors.

The financial services industry in particular is in the throes of dramatic change, with established incumbents vying with upstart fintech companies to grow their businesses and increase market share. All seek to be more innovative, with cloud computing being a linchpin of this new, highly competitive arena.

Winners embrace the cloud because it enables innovation, enhances business agility, and provides an immense capacity to scale up. The cloud enables business and product teams to quickly create and deploy new customer experiences in a natural, seamless way. It can enable a cloud-based contact center that can scale on demand and enable customer interactions on their platform of choice. And for operations teams, it can offer new ways of reimagining business processes – and accelerate the journey from idea to implementation. In short, the cloud lets firms do more, do it faster, and do it with an increased probability of success.

The “pure digital” fintech companies know these benefits already; the cloud is their default infrastructure, which gives them an edge over firms that rely on mainframe architectures. But transforming incumbent players to the cloud can be done – and it’s important to do it right. What does cloud transformation look like for financial services firms?

Driven By Strategy & Technology

In Wipro’s view, adopting cloud computing is not solely a technology initiative. The most successful cloud transformation occurs when strategic business needs and technology come together. It’s best to drive cloud initiatives from the senior leadership level; alignment and conviction are critically important.

Paying attention to these key factors can catalyze successful cloud transformations:

• Ensure the organizational culture is ready to embrace change and innovation
• Identify the customer journey(s) for transformation and cloud adoption
• Create teams with business users, product teams, and technology professionals so everyone is aligned from the beginning
• Start by defining an “MVP” (minimal viable product), then add features and functionality incrementally and iteratively
• Address security, regulatory, risks, and compliance aspects early
• Build a foundation to ensure business continuity and resiliency

The benefits of a cloud transformation do not come easily for firms that have been in business for decades. Their existing core systems and legacy technology represent a substantial hurdle. In addition, cloud projects pose others challenges that it’s best to be aware of before implementation:

• Funding the transformation efforts
• Lack of expertise and skills available in the organization
• Ever-changing technology landscape and complexity in implementation
• Solving for multi-cloud and concerns about cloud vendor lock-in

Partnering in the Journey

Wipro has worked across multiple industries and sectors to enable successful cloud transformation journeys and has built strong capabilities around defining transformation constructs and blueprints to bring speed and scale to the effort. Wipro focuses on three aresa to drive the cloud transformation efforts.

Strategy: Grounding the transformation approach focuses on understanding and defining the strategic intent, business drivers, building the funding model (which might be self-funding, reduced TCO, etc.), and defining the operating construct and program governance.

Cloud Migration: Wipro has a well-defined cloud migration and modernization framework starting with discovery and assessments, defining the disposition strategy, move group planning, design, and migration execution. This is supported by a proprietary Cloud Studio offering with industry-adopted tools and blueprints to ensure successful cloud-adoption journeys.

Operations:  When a firm is successfully up and running on the cloud, ongoing operations require a strong foundation of observability and resiliency, with well-defined operational processes. Wipro’s Digital Ops Center helps ensure ongoing cloud success with the required toolsets and monitoring capability.

Next Steps

For more and more financial services firms, the question is not “whether” they’ll adopt a cloud approach to their IT infrastructure, but “when.” The challenges are substantial, but so are the benefits. When it’s time to think about a cloud journey, Wipro can help design, implement, and manage a transformation that will add value in the near-term and in the future.

References:

1. https://www.informationweek.com/cloud/cloud-tech-the-make-or-break-in-todays-business-resiliency/a/d-id/1339322?
2. https://www.smallbusinessbonfire.com/cloud-computing-changing-business-today/