Nutanix Helps Financial Services Organizations in Saudi Arabia Reimagine their Cloud Journey

RIYADH, KSA, Gulftech: Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, has reiterated its commitment to helping financial services organizations in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia discover the power of hybrid multicloud architecture to enable them to strike a balance between cost, complexity, speed, and scale of operations and generate more revenue.

“A key development in the ‘business of finance’ is that IT isn’t a support function anymore. As a result of the increasing impact and importance of data and analytics, technology has become a strategic asset that drives innovation, scalability, and speed-to-market in financial services,” says Charbel Bechara, Senior Regional Channel Sales Manager – KSA, Bahrain & Qatar at Nutanix. “Nutanix’s third annual Enterprise Cloud Index has found that against the backdrop of the pandemic, hybrid multicloud is the only viable IT model that shows positive growth in the finance industry. As information security and operational resiliency remain at the forefront for financial services organizations, they must look to hybrid multicloud solutions like the Nutanix Cloud Platform with integrated manageability and security, and the ability to quickly move apps among cloud infrastructures cost-effectively.”

Optimizing Setup and Running Costs
Legacy hardware and software are some of the biggest burdens that hinder architecture upgrades in FinServ. Organizations are making do with outdated technology simply because of the prohibitive cost of refactoring and re-platforming their core systems. Companies don’t need to be bogged down by legacy technology anymore. The Nutanix Cloud Platform has been shown to return a staggering 477% ROI in 5 years while lowering TCO by two-thirds. This means maximizing the company’s investment in on-prem infrastructure within the foreseeable future.

Meeting Customer Expectations Every Time
The pandemic has brought out a dramatic change in the way customers make financial dealings. While digital transactions were already on the rise, they’re the norm now. Banks and financial institutions have already woken up to the new reality of 100% digital workflows in lending, payments, insurance claims, and trading ops. Add to that the plethora of contactless payment methods emerging every day and customers wanting the flexibility to trade in complex financial products from their mobile phones, and enterprises need to redefine their IT capabilities.

Nutanix is customizable and lets organizations set up hybrid multicloud environments for testing and development within the hour. Migrating to the new cloud doesn’t need to be tedious. What’s more, the application services layer has automation and provisioning capabilities that enable companies to implement the latest DevOps practices. Ultimately, these automated processes can shave off over a quarter of their development times.

Preventing Security Breaches
The average cost of a data breach in FinServ is a mind boggling $5.85 million – over 1.5 times the average of all other sectors. The industry remains a favourite of cybercriminals and bad actors because of the treasure trove of customer information (and money) that’s up for grabs. The COVID-19 situation has forced a virtually overnight transition to remote work and increased the number of devices and networks involved. This means FSIs are more vulnerable to data and identity theft in the form of authentication and validation fraud, phishing, social engineering, DDoS, and ransomware.

The Nutanix Cloud Platform allows companies to pre-empt these exacerbated threats by deploying secure VDI or DaaS systems that allow for scaling remote work while flagging known and suspected breaches at either end. Strong security across workloads and platforms means companies can breathe easy even in the absence of fortified perimeters, ensuring digital continuity and data protection in the face of all-too-prevalent ransomware threats.

Meeting Compliance Requirements
With or without the pandemic, FinServ is a melting pot of operational patterns that need to adapt to macroeconomic factors and consumer behaviour alike. Data processing and analytics is the key factor around which government regulations as well as compliance processes revolve. Cloud based systems accelerate data brokering and also make it easy to mine trade surveillance data for money-laundering or fraud patterns. Nutanix’s hybrid deployments help solidify the cloud journey with preconfigured controls to modernize an organization’s risk monitoring platforms, derive new insights and trends from data, and enable continuous governance while reducing compliance costs.

“While the FinServ industry has been making a shift to the cloud over the past few years, less than a third of FSIs that are halfway through the process have achieved even a 5% completion of key transformation objectives such as, increase in deposit and loan volumes, IT agility, customer retention, and reducing operational expenses,” says Charbel Bechara.

“Many FSIs make the mistake of layering piecemeal cloud solutions on their existing infrastructure in an attempt to achieve functional goals. But this only makes it even more difficult for disparate workloads to scale together. In some cases, one bottleneck might entirely derail the company-wide transformation efforts. The Nutanix Cloud Platform underpinning an organization’s hybrid multicloud strategy provides a three-pronged solution that is critical to success – democratization, automation and unification,” he concludes.