FINAL WORD
Sheena Chin , Managing Director of
Asean , Cohesity
Lurking in the wings are new entrants from other sectors such as Grab , whose financial platform is intended to disrupt the banking sector much like its ride hailing services have disrupted the taxi sector .
Adding to this is the omnipresent mandate for corporate governance . The spaghetti-like nature of data centers that have not been modernized makes them a fine hiding place for data and that can mean an inability to react adequately to a regulator ’ s demand to see an email message or details of a trade .
Smart company executives in FI understand this but have struggled to make the necessary changes .
The result is data fragmentation on an epic scale where data is stored and duplicated in an opaque and disconnected matrix of data islands such as backups , file shares , archives , analytics programs and other homes to enterprise data .
Many CIOs have sought the answer in moving to the cloud but the issue of data fragmentation continues to follow and haunt them . Cohesity surveyed 900 senior IT decision-makers in 2019 and discovered a chasm between the benefits they expected and what they actually got from migrations to the public cloud .
In fact , 91 % of respondents said data is fragmented across clouds , so rather than getting rid of data fragmentation , moving to new deployment platforms makes the problem worse . Fragmentation means data is less secure , infrastructure costs can run high , IT staff do not want to work on outdated systems , and finding reliable data for governance or analytics purposes becomes tougher and tougher .
The answer to all of this lies in having a modern approach to data management that the old storage hardware behemoths , hooked on a business model of selling more and more refrigerator-sized arrays and storage capacity , cannot provide .
Companies in the FI sector need to embrace a softwaredefined platform approach to data management , where workloads and data islands can be easily consolidated and managed through one user interface .
This platform approach not only extends to data onpremises but data in the cloud . Additionally , financial institutions should look at other opportunities to improve compliance , which could be done , in part through , applications that sit on the platform .
These applications can look for personally identifiable data and can play a key role in data governance . Financial firms can also deploy other applications that can improve security or utilize analytics to enhance the customer experience .
Many CIOs have sought the answer in moving to the cloud but the issue of data fragmentation continues to follow and haunt them .
This is far more than an IT issue ; it is a vital source of competitive differentiation that will help firms even stand out from start-ups that are not weighed down by legacy systems but lack the depth of data and the customer bases that incumbents can call on .
The FI space is unusual in that it still contains players that have existed for more than a hundred years . However , if the major established banks and the old insurance and finance marques want to survive they have to modernize . That starts from their single most valuable resource along with their brands – data . p
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