A report from Veritas Technologies claims that the finance and insurance industries are failing to maintain data backups, visibility and scalability in their digital transformation ambitions and journey to the cloud.
The Veritas 2020 Data Management in a Multi-Cloud World: Finance and Insurance report explores the pressures facing both industries as they continue to transform to meet competition, compliance, flexibility and security challenges. The report said that while that cloud adoption is experiencing strong growth, with 48 percent of organisational data stored or managed in the public cloud. IT decision makers in finance and insurance expect this figure to rise to 78 percent in just five years’ time.
The disruption caused by COVID-19 has accelerated this process. Prior to the pandemic, 50 percent of respondents listed cloud adoption among their top three organisational priorities. Following the outbreak, this has shot up to include 62 percent of finance and insurance IT leaders. Cloud has become a central tool to help companies cope with modern working practises, which have only been exacerbated by working from home during the pandemic.
A third of organisations believed they would happily run all applications and workloads from the cloud, despite continued concerns around security and compliance. Security fears are the barrier to embracing the cloud, with 84 percent of IT leaders citing them as a concern when adopting public cloud technology.
Stringent regulatory requirements are another major barrier. Over half (52 percent) of respondents indicate that the risk of non-compliance is one of their biggest challenges around cloud adoption. Indeed, nine in ten (89 percent) agree that legislation and regulation make data management more challenging.
Veritas Technologies Senior Director and Head of Technology Ian Wood said: “Cloud service adoption is increasingly likely for most industries, and finance and insurance is no exception. Yet, the need for hybrid- and multi-cloud technology is tempered by fear of what might happen if something goes wrong.”
He thought that these fears are holding these institutions back from technical advantage that could see them matching and exceeding the abilities of their younger and more agile competitors.
Another area that appears to be lacking is data backup solutions. Just 21 percent of respondents claim their organisation could back up all workloads equally effectively.
The scalability of backups and disaster recovery is another issue. While 96 percent of IT leaders think the process is achievable for their organisation, and 87 per cent believe it could be easier.
These challenges are not helped by the fact that 83 percent use multiple vendors or solutions within their data protection infrastructure.
Only 13 per cent of finance and insurance companies have a consolidated on-premise and cloud solution. Couple this with the fact that just 15 per cent claim their existing tools and processes give them full visibility of unstructured data, it’s clear data management remains an on-going issue for the sector.
The report shows that 95 percent of respondents admit that their organisation could also improve their approach to managing and processing Subject Access Requests (SARs). IT leaders admitted their organisations need to improve on speed (84 percent), scalability (76 per cent), and visibility throughout the process (74 percent) when it comes to SARs.
Wood said: “So long as finance and insurance organisations lack control and visibility over their data, they remain vulnerable. They’re likely victims of cyberattack, regulatory punishment and reputational damage. However, these industries know where they can improve and are taking the steps to do so. At present, backup processes are often not automated or comprehensive enough, data visibility needs improving, and scalability of data management as cloud deployments grows is not yet optimised. Organisations must continue to improve their data management so that they have the all-encompassing data visibility to ensure they remain compliant and secure.”
