Financial Services firms are being challenged and forced to change the way that their applications, information, content, compute, storage, and network resources are deployed and consumed. It is a multi-dimensional issue that is forcing financial services firms to change of how IT is delivered. They are beginning to look for ways to stretch their data centers, as they often need more compute and storage capacity than their own facilities provide, especially during those peak high-demand times. The move is toward the service delivery of IT through cloud computing, a dynamic and service-oriented delivery paradigm that organizes and allocates IT-enabled services to meet business demand as needed.

Challenges With Financial Services IT Delivery

Data centers are costly to build and operate, but there are times when you need more resources. Cisco's InterCloud solution lets banks create a hybrid cloud to extend their data center and cloud capacity when needed. Through InterCloud, banks can store more data and have more computing power, operating just as if it were in an on-premises data center. InterCloud could also be used to augment current big data and risk/analytics environments that banks have deployed in recent years. In many cases, additional compute capacity is needed only for a short time in order to run certain risk models or to provide additional reporting for regulatory requirements.

The Trend to Hybrid Clouds

Today's banks are in various stages of their cloud journey. Some have built their own private cloud and have frequent need for additional capacity. Others utilize third parties to augment their own in-house application development efforts. In some cases, these facilities are located off-shore and are not permitted to connect to, or utilize the bank's internal network. In these instances, banks can benefit from using Cisco's InterCloud solution to have temporary compute capacity, without a significant capital expenditure and the amount of time it takes to deploy, configure and operationalize new computing platforms and environments.

A number of trends have emerged that are inclining banks to use hybrid clouds.

• They need the flexibility of more capacity on demand without building to peak capacity in their data centers.
• They want added capacity to be available temporarily and to be able to use more or less capacity as needed.
• They need extra capacity to enable their data center and their internal cloud to behave identically.
• They are tasked with controlling costs and helping ensure security. Public clouds can cost less than building out a company's own data center, and a public cloud should absorb a company's need for elasticity and offer pay-as-you-grow expansion. In addition, a hybrid cloud should provide the same security and privacy as a company's on-premises data center.
• They need to be more agile.

InterCloud's Differentiated Services

With InterCloud, financial institutions can build secure hybrid clouds and extend their existing data center to public clouds on demand. InterCloud provides a purpose built, secure environment in which financial services institutions can very efficiently expand their compute capacity at a very low cost. In addition, the institution has full transparency to the environment from a monitoring and systems management perspective. Several of the key features of the InterCloud offering are:

• Self-service consumption of hybrid resources with end-user and IT portals.
• Workload provisioning and bi-directional migration across on-premises and cloud resources.
• End-to-end security with consistent policy enforcement across the hybrid cloud
• A single point of management and control for physical and virtual workloads across multiple private and public clouds.
• A choice of cloud providers and hypervisors.
• Connect on-premises data center infrastructure to multiple service providers and take advantage of flexible, pay-as-you-grow capacity.

Interested in finding out more about how Cisco can help your firm solve its cloud infrastructure challenges? Visit our solutions page to learn.