A considerable amount of information technology expenses go for data storage and analysis, which is necessary for ensuring high standards of services and minimizing risks. Due to most financial organizations currently going through digital transformation, IT executives are seeking ways of storage infrastructure optimization. Let’s discuss the most resource-intensive IT trends as regards information storage and management in the financial sector.
Big data analytics
Big data is ever-growing volumes of structured and unstructured information of various formats within a single context. By various estimates, about 80–90% of banking data is unstructured, most of which comes from various types of interaction with clients through call centers, e-mails, social media, ATMs, and other sources.
Big data analytics opens up new perspectives for financial institutions. Due to consumers using more than one bank for conducting their financial activities, banks have to increasingly rely on big data to get an accurate picture of consumer needs. The big data technology allows banks to have a better understanding of clients’ needs, make the right decisions, and respond to market demands more promptly. Financial institutions must store increasing amounts of data, while more unstructured data from multiple sources puts much pressure on the existing storage infrastructure.
Business application continuity
Today, when people use the internet for virtually any activity ranging from paying bills to buying stocks, the need for secure and efficient data storage is more relevant than ever for financial institutions. This results in the need for a flexible storage system that would allow for safe scale-up of resources, compliance with changing regulations, and processing transactions in the real-time mode. More advanced security tools lead to increased complexity and growing overhead costs.
To cut costs, financial institutions choose cloud storage. Yet, for many reasons, hybrid storage solutions are a safe option for many banks. These solutions are effective and cost-efficient; they help financial institutions meet demands of the increasingly complex sector. Private cloud infrastructure also allows for full compliance with regulatory requirements such as data sovereignty.
Storage consolidation
Managing different data storage systems in an enterprise infrastructure produces excessive load on IT teams, with surging costs and a greater unnecessary complexity. More enterprises are looking to consolidate numerous storage workloads onto fewer systems, especially as they approach storage upgrade.
This is why the opportunity for storage consolidation, which allows for increased security and dynamic growth, is a priority for many financial sector clients who seek data storage solutions. Storage consolidation reduces expenses, improves flexibility, and simplifies working with an excessive number of suppliers.
By consolidating four or five storage arrays into a single one, a company utilizes the benefits of more efficient data sharing and increased productivity through an easier centralized management, as well as through lower power consumption and minimum overhead.
Conclusions
Successful digital transformation is pushing for the use of more data-oriented business models. Those who can boost value of collected data for their clients and their own companies prove to be the most successful.
Financial institutions are focused on digital transformation and ways to receive return on investments in the IT infrastructure. It is not sufficient for companies solely to ensure maximum productivity, reliability, scalability, manageability and flexibility of their IT infrastructure; they need to solve the issue of exponentially growing uncontrollable expenses and receive payback in the very short term. IT executives are taking efforts to reduce risks and costs, automate the process of storage infrastructure management, and minimize negative effects of setbacks and downtime on their business. Data storage consolidation is becoming increasingly relevant for both financial companies and providers of services. The transformation of the data storage economy will allow companies and cloud service providers to focus on business rather than on infrastructure.
By Vasily Kostryukov, Technical Director for Russia & CIS at Infinidat