Why financial services today need IBM Storage

23 January, 2017
John Ramieri
IBM

If data is that critical to the success of business decisions, then storage is the foundation of cognitive strategy and hybrid cloud is the platform for which cognitive solutions are built. Every building begins with a solid foundation. IBM Storage solutions are part of that solid foundation that will help drive success in your journey to taking a cognitive and cloud approach to analyzing, protecting and delivering your data.

The data explosion — driven by mobile, social and the intense instrumentation of the world around us — provides a unique opportunity for the storage business.  Simply put, storage infrastructure is everywhere and has the potential to empowers organizations to convert data into insight and ultimately better and faster decision-making.

The financial industry is one area going through rapid transformation driven by data. Customers are now able to do most anything online, from paying bills to buying stocks, and on multiple devices. The need for secure and efficient network storage is more essential than ever for financial institutions. Along with the IT industry itself, the banking and financial services industry is among the top spenders on IT. A large chunk of this spending is dedicated to data storage and analysis to maintain high security standards and the speed that consumers demand.

Changing consumer behavior

As industry analysts can tell you, the vast majority of bank data is unstructured data, most of which comes from various types of customer interactions from call centers, email, social media, ATMs and more. Banks must process and analyze this data to remain competitive and provide adequate customer service. Because consumers no longer use one bank to conduct all financial activities, banks must increasingly rely on big data to get an accurate picture of their needs.

Government regulations

Not only do consumers raise the bar for financial institutions and financial services data storage, but so do governments. Recent US regulations impose an even greater demand on major financial institutions, requiring them to take a horizontal view of trading risk. Obtaining these analyses requires the integration of financial data from various silos across an institution from different capture systems, several times a day. These regulations require financial institutions to store at least ten years of data for backup, disaster recovery and archiving. The challenge for financial institutions is to do all this while keeping redundant copies to a minimum for efficiency and to keep costs low.

Competitive advantage with a unified software defined vision

The key to lowering cost and creating a much more agile IT environment is putting function and capability into a software layer that not only uses commodity hardware and the infrastructure you already have, but shares those resources against a series of workloads. Just imagine: compute, storage and networking that can also leverage on or off-premises cloud infrastructure seamlessly and make it invisible to the user. This shifts focus to the service level agreement (SLA) and workload demands rather than the what and how. This software layer provides the flexibility of improved capabilities without having to change the hardware infrastructures to get there.

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Finally, although it is a new concept, IBM is a leader in software defined storage platforms. This ranking is further evidence of the proven nature of IBM Spectrum Storage solutions, enabling clients to deploy with confidence.

There are multiple entry points to this journey. Let’s discuss how you can get started.

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