Financial services organizations operate in a highly competitive market which puts great emphasis on the IT infrastructure to remain robust and efficient. Understandably banks, insurance companies, trading firms and others have traditionally kept their IT on-premise, where they can maintain their own specifications and controls.
And it’s proved to be a prudent option, particularly for essential applications like batch services, database and storage, mainframe services, along with high-performance and grid computing – for example, for running trading systems or operational analytics.
However, competitive pressures and the massive advantages that cloud computing offers, are driving more financial service IT departments to move their workloads off-premise. Gartner predicts that “by 2025, 80 percent of enterprises will migrate entirely away from on-premise data centers with the current trend of moving workloads to colocation, hosting and the cloud leading them to shut down their traditional data center.”
For many businesses, this means seeking out colocation facilities where they can maintain their preferred specifications. They can also gain the benefits of leveraging a collocation partner, without losing control of their IT infrastructure.
Naturally, financial service institutions are also exploring private and public cloud services for non-core workloads like AI, Blockchain, and big data analytics, which require scalability and processing power. But public cloud is still not sufficiently secure, controllable or cost-efficient for most financial services systems.
And so, the best environment by far is colocation for its ability to mirror an on-premise environment, whilst also providing adequate controls and flexibility. Here are some of the main reasons why it’s worth considering going down the colocation route.
Availability and continuity
Top tier colocation data center facilities are designed for availability, continuity and redundancy. They will have emergency services available in case of a power outage, with additional power supplies, generators, batteries and so on, with outage scenarios tested regularly to ensure continuity for clients. Plus, collocation hosting providers are obliged to maintain SLAs and business as usual. As a result, you may discover that colocation enhances the customer experience, offering less lag and downtime compared with public cloud services.
IT management and support
Colocation service providers can also take care of day-to-day IT management, carrying out essential maintenance tasks such as server provisioning, patching and updating, and performance monitoring. This frees up your IT staff to concentrate on strategic and business-centric goals and tasks, or revenue-generating or customer-centric functions, instead of spending time on routine operations.
Furthermore, colocation service providers can provide additional support and assistance to your technical and management teams, which is useful for configuring, extending, managing and integrating IT equipment and applications.
Data center costs
Colocation facilities can help firms shift big capital costs to smaller and more predictable operational costs, as they consume some of their IT as a service. In addition, Marc Burkels, IT Chapter Lead at ING Nederland, points out, “Setting up and maintaining availability, continuity, security, and scalability on premise can be quite expensive. In a datacenter, the services and costs are shared between all customers helping to make it a more affordable option.”
With our expertise innovative physical data center infrastructure solutions, Panduit can help you build a responsive and robust IT system, with the option to base this in secure and reliable colocation facilities of your choice.
We work closely with our clients and offer practical help and expertise and collaboratively with our fully trained and vetted ecosystem of partners to implement an infrastructure that will help you avoid vendor and technology lock-in now and in the future. Is it time for you to move your IT off-premise?
Discover more about Panduit’s colocation data center solutions in our new ebook, Three Key Trends Driving Financial Services IT Transformation.
