Banks rapidly migrate to cloud despite risks

A Harris Poll survey commissioned by Google found that 83% of financial services executives said their organizations are making the transition to cloud infrastructure for their primary computing needs and those who continue to use on-premises infrastructures revealed that an average of 40% of their workloads are poised for migration to the public cloud over the next year, ZDNet reports.

Banking leaders’ top reason for making the switch to the cloud is the ability to respond to consumers’ evolving demands, according to the poll. Of the financial institutions surveyed, 28% use a single cloud and only 17% rely on a multi-cloud architecture.

The switch poses potential risks to the banking industry, said Leighton James, chief technology officer of multi-cloud services provider UKCloud, who noted that 80% of shares in the cloud market is currently held by five major firms, including Microsoft and Amazon. A failure of one system used by multiple banking institutions, therefore, would risk crashing a major portion of the financial sector.