recently I was in discussion with friends in the banking industry on the adoption of cloud platforms for Indian banking applications. Here are my (incoherent) thoughts on why it should happen
First of all, even without having any of their applications in the cloud, their applications and data are exposed to the cloud. For example, a lot of payment platforms (like UPI, Visa/MasterCard, etc) and many more applications running on the cloud are accessing their data. also, these platforms may be running in data centers located offshore and not in India.
Like other industries, Banks are competing for customers based on their ability to provide a superior user experience. This has made them most likely to succeed when providing that experience. this can be best achieved by well-developed APIs that can adapt to quickly changing needs of integrated applications. these APIs may be required to adopt/change quickly depending on customers/partner's requirements.
To begin with, they can start looking to transition applications/API, that are primarily being accessed from outside the bank, to the cloud.
The key pillars for transitioning to fulfill these requirements are
- the deployment of a next-generation cloud-native platform
- adoption of DevOps and agile methodologies while creating quick feedback and change loops
- use of microservices for development of APIs
For monolithic on-prem applications also they can start looking for cloud solutions that can benefit their day-to-day operations but does not require to move highly secured data to the cloud. like doing analysis on log and performance data generated by technology stack used for developing the applications. this data mostly does not contain any business insights or confidential user data and hence can be moved to the cloud.
So as long as they have a good strategy on how to transition to the cloud and can control what is going to the cloud, they would immensely benefit from it.
