The impact of the digital revolution accelerated in the past year impacting nearly every sector of society – and have reached the realm of the financial industry. The traditional banking industry faced significant pressure from rapidly shifting consumer expectations, changing regulations, and increasing competition from digital-native disruptors to provide a secure and uninterrupted experiences.
For decades, banks ran their own data centers due to the fact that maintaining their own facilities is strategically and economically liable as well as complying with regulatory constraints around customer data. The ease of accessibility of data via financial technologies like wire transfers, credit/debit cards, online banking and mobile payments have led banks to not only upgrade their systems to accommodate these changes but also transform their processes to ensure continued security when adopting these emerging technologies.
The demand for outsourced data centers has increased as customers require flexible, scalable data center solutions that are both operationally and financially optimal.
Data Centers and the Financial Industry
Known for its highly regulated environment for security and data privacy, the financial sector has historically averted the adoption of cloud as the industry handles sensitive and private customers’ financial information, if compromised, could disrupt businesses.
In the current fast-paced, tech-driven world that we are living in, the financial services industry has an opportunity to use cloud technology to drive growth, improve customer experiences and stay up to date with ever-changing compliance regulations. As the data centers evolves to support the increasing need for data storage, financial institutions are embracing a more holistic approach adapting their infrastructure to suit the needs of the business.
Storing and transferring confidential data is an extremely sensitive process. With cloud infrastructure being hosted in a data center, customers can benefit from all the security policies and procedures that the data centers must adhere to. This includes factors such as physical power and cooling, levels of redundancy, and uptime SLAs, ensuring that an organisation’s financial data is always available and always secure.
Khazna Data Centers builds and orchestrates a comprehensive ecosystem through state-of-the-art data centers that safeguard data, provide trusted turnkey solutions, empower ICT strategies, and enable digital transformation for world-class organizations through highly secure, efficient, reliable, and scalable facilities.
A Clear Demand for Digital Banking in MENA region
Efficient technology solutions that meet the advanced analytical demands of digital transformation will enable financial organizations to fully leverage the capabilities of unstructured and high-volume data, discover competitive advantages, and drive new market opportunities.
Customers now embrace fully integrated mobile banking experiences, using smartphones, tablets, and wearables to conduct banking services and transactions.
The adoption of digital payments across the globe is on an upward trajectory, and this has further accelerated in light of the coronavirus pandemic. Digital payment volumes increased due to the proliferation of digital payment solutions today such as bitcoin and cashless innovations - made possible by the high rates of internet penetration.
CapEx to OpEx
For organizations looking to fully embrace digital transformation, retaining IT and financial flexibility is essential to their continued growth and change.
Cloud technologies have altered the provisioning and delivery of computing services, as well as IT business and financial models. Enterprises have delegated management of an ever-increasing amount of their IT infrastructure to cloud service providers, due to the realization of significant capital expenditure (CapEx) savings through the economies of scale delivered by the cloud.
The cloud has reduced, and in many instances have eliminated, the time and cost of acquiring, installing, and managing physical on-premises IT assets-servers, storage, communications, and space. As data and processing demands increase or services need to be provided in new locations, the cloud has enabled these resources to be rapidly and economically deployed.
Shifting data center costs from CapEx to OpEx gives companies much greater flexibility, allowing them to adapt rapidly to changing market conditions as they undergo their digital transformation. Where organization once made a decision to invest in infrastructure and software, today they have a wide range of vendors and solutions partners to choose from. In addition to colocation providers, they also have the flexibility to adopt multiple software solutions thanks to cloud-based platforms that have effectively turned software into an OpEx.
The financial sector depends on data centers for success. That will almost certainly remain true as data-driven technologies become more advanced and financial entities explore them.