Cloud adoption is increasingly powering the banking industry’s ability to improve customer engagement worldwide. Though many banks are still in the early stages of adoption, the use of sophisticated and secure ways of migrating to the cloud is growing steadily across the industry. Cloud applications such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) enable banks to drive enhanced operational efficiency, increase revenue growth by supporting transactional systems, and forge a collaborative ecosystem. According to a recent study by Gartner, by 2020 banks will use the cloud to support more than half of transactional systems.
Cloud in banking is not a new concept— banks have been using cloud for non-critical systems, such as email, CRM, and application development, for many years. However, critical transactional applications, including deposits, loans, and more, were not moved to the cloud because banks feared doing so would be a security risk. Instead, banks historically relied on creating an IT infrastructure using hardware in data centers— all owned and operated by the bank. This provided a workable solution to protect the facility against perceived risk until fairly recently.