A Next Step in Boosting Financial Services Agility

Competitive edge is everything in financial services. Local branches in the right places used to be enough to attract and keep customers loyal. Not anymore. Today's financial services advantages are digital first. Simpler loan applications, millisecond-faster trading processes and omni-channel customer experiences give customers reasons to change.

Across the financial services industry — banks, investment firms, payment processors, insurance companies and more — business and IT leaders are teaming up to deliberately and aggressively disrupt their own markets. They see agile FinTechs encroaching by better leveraging data to their advantage, and there is urgency among traditional brands to change heritage approaches. That's why big and small financial firms alike are accelerating digital transformation and modernizing data management.

Modern data management can help firms improve agility and deepen customer engagement. That's because a single, web-scale platform can bring together data that has traditionally been inefficient and hidden, fragmented across on-premises, cloud and branch locations, into a usable environment that can be analyzed for new business insights.

Moreover, modern data management eliminates silos and simplifies IT complexity, leading to more time for innovation across key financial services initiatives such as these:

• Customer experiences that leverage insights from quality data.
• Increased banker and customer support staff productivity.
• Trading efficiency for less time-sensitive transactions.
• Defending data against ransomware attacks.
• IT modernization that introduces efficiencies and lowers costs, particularly at branch locations.
• Strengthening business continuity — in cases of disasters and malicious attacks.

How can modern data management help agility?

A robust modern data management solution and services can help ensure financial services organizations use all of their data and applications for competitive edge. Because the single, software-defined platform serves many use cases, it can be used to solve a variety of IT challenges.

First, it uses automation and an intuitive interface to simplify backup and recovery for the protection of sensitive financial data with personally identifiable information (PII) such as non-real-time trading data, loan documents, call logs, datasets for AI/ML and more. That helps IT teams more reliably and securely serve customer and financial organizations' needs — from anywhere — at lower costs and with fewer manual processes.

Another popular use of the solution in financial services is simplifying file and object services. The scale-out solution is an ideal replacement for costly and aging Windows file shares, as well as a repository for storing branch/broker lobby video surveillance. This is particularly helpful to financial services organizations looking to adopt cloud for long-term data retention because IT teams can store not only backup data but also unstructured data (files and objects) on the same web-scale platform — at core, cloud and branch locations.

Modern data management is also an ideal solution for financial services firms that need to curate and perform analysis on massive datasets. Teams can identify precise data located in production apps for faster time to insights. And there is flexibility for us with artificial intelligence and machine learning projects.

Built in software, the solution lowers risk by reducing data center footprints and boosting data security by providing protection against ransomware. Capabilities such as Cohesity immutable snapshots and DataLock (as well as machine learning) prevent, detect and help teams recover fast from ransomware attacks.

As the need grows for rapid delivery of modern apps across financial services to meet new and changing market and customer demands, a modern data management platform enables agile dev/test. The Cohesity platform speeds data curation and application development whether it takes place on premises or in multicloud environments such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

For business continuity, an optimized solution converges backup and automated disaster recovery for near-zero application downtime and no data loss. And with these typically time-consuming tasks that must be managed separately eliminated, the solution frees IT staff to work on more innovative projects.

Data drives financial services. Let modern data management help your organization do more with all of your data on your digital transformation journey.

As a solution provider to more than 40 of the world's largest banks and financial services firms, as well as 78 of the Fortune 100, we are in unique position to understand the modern data management trends across global financial services.

Our experts are experienced in strategy, architecture and daily defense. They will work with you to make sure your investments further business goals, integrate into an architecture and mature your data management posture.