Modernizing VMware Investments Across Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures in the Financial Services Sector
Oracle applications continue to impact how financial services institutions engage in strategic planning and manage day-to-day operations cannot be overstated.
The sector has demonstrated hesitancy with security concerns and compliance associated with modernizing and moving Oracle workloads to cloud environments.
Technology executives are exploring the risks and rewards associated with Oracle modernization and migration to cloud environments, seeking to understand the resiliency issues that must be addressed to ensure high levels of availability and access to mission-critical Oracle applications.
The impact that Oracle applications continue to have on how financial services institutions engage in strategic planning and manage day-to-day operations cannot be overstated. That said, this highly regulated and risk-averse sector has demonstrated some hesitancy with the concerns about security and compliance associated with modernizing and moving Oracle workloads to cloud environments (within corporate boundaries and in public cloud environments). So says Dale Hoffman, director of product design for VMware and financial services cloud solutions at IBM, in a podcast interview with BizTechReports.
“A rising threat landscape characterized most dramatically by the growing number of ransomware attacks -- and other cyber-criminal activities -- targeting institutions has given technology leaders involved in transformation and modernization issues reason to be very careful,” said Hoffman.
In general, he says, technology executives in the sector are exploring the risks and rewards associated with Oracle modernization and migration to cloud environments. They seek to understand the business continuity and resiliency issues that must be addressed to ensure high levels of availability and access to mission-critical Oracle applications.
“There is a deep desire to figure out how to maintain, run, and operate Oracle applications across complex heterogeneous environments, as hybrid infrastructures integrate on-prem and public cloud (often multiple public clouds) environments,” Hoffman said.
Getting a handle on the economic implications of modernization and migration of Oracle applications is also top of mind with technology leaders in financial organizations.
“After years of keeping this critical platform on-premises, it is important for executives to explicitly address the move from CAPEX-oriented legacy infrastructures associated with traditional deployments to more OPEX-intensive models,” he said.
Dale Hoffman, IBM
As executives engage in this economic analysis, it will be necessary for institutions to look at costs and investments in the context of broader transformation objectives -- which often entail elevating agility and improving the ability to analyze data across the enterprise effectively.
“Moving VMware to modern platforms should open options and opportunities to see how the data and this critical enterprise application can contribute more to financial institutions,” said Hoffman.
IBM has developed a set of hyper-protected crypto services that revolve around securing cloud service endpoints. This strategy, he pointed out, applies encryption to the entire environment. It is a strategy that securely integrates cloud and on-prem resources while ensuring cloud migration’s operational and economic benefits.
“As institutions move VMware workloads to modern infrastructures -- both on-prem and in the cloud -- it is important to develop a strategy that ensures no unauthorized cloud administrator can ever get to these keys. This should elevate the comfort level associated with migration and modernization of Oracle apps without compromising business operations,” he concludes.
For more information on BizTechReport podcast interviews, please contact Melissa Fisher at MFisher@BizTechReports.com.