Hybrid Cloud at the Mission-critical Core: A Step in the Right Direction for Middle East FSIs?

FINANCIAL service operations are increasingly software-driven, from infrastructure to core operational platforms, applications, and data workloads.

Cloud-native analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and blockchain solutions are key harpoons for FSIs to run agile, remain available, and innovate faster to meet the changing customer demands.

The future of financial services is now, on cloud.

What’s Brewing in the Middle East?

The fintech industry in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has surpassed global average growth projections, accelerating at 36 per cent compound aggregate growth rate (CAGR). A Mckinsey study estimates that fintech revenue shall triple from 2022 to 2025, on the back of rising mobile banking penetration and forward-thinking regulations from central banks.

Notably, the open banking ecosystem is poised to generate over a billion dollars in value by 2027, a transformative precursor to an AI upsurge. AI in BFSI is expected to contribute around 13.6 per cent of the entire region’s GDP by 2030!

At least eight out of 10 FSIs in the Gulf plan to increase cloud investments up till 2026. But what cloud model serves them best?

Fully cloud-native or hybrid: The big question?

Moving all in on hyperscale cloud could be transformative but was not always the immediate option for all Middle East FSIs considering the latter’s complexity of operations, diverse legacy platforms onboarded, and stringency of data laws involved.

Many financial firms are running on legacy infrastructure cores aged 25 years or older, with non-scalable systems supporting monolithic platforms, applications, and databases.

A well-architected mix of on-prem/private cloud with public cloud workloads is a more sensible, disruption-free, and faster-to-achieve middle path with in-country compliant hybrid cloud solutions delivered by trusted MSPs such as Cloud4C.

While FSIs can move their mission-critical consumer facing applications to modern cloud platforms and keep the data core on-prem, newer fintech players can choose between multiple clouds to run cloud-native workloads and expand faster.

Be it availability, agility, or customisability, hybrid clouds are a great foundation for long-term technology transformations, especially for heterogenous and heavily regulated ecosystems like that of financial services.

RISK-FREE MISSION-CRITICAL BFSI TRANSFORMATIONS WITH CLOUD4C

Trusted by four of the top 10 banks in the Middle East and 100+ FSIs across the globe, Cloud4C renders risk-free, cost-effective, and fully managed hybrid cloud solutions in a single SLA from infrastructure till application login, guaranteeing maximum availability end-to-end. Cloud4C provides cloud hosting, managed services on public, private, hybrid, multi-cloud architectures, and is the intelligent cloud partner for leading ISVs in the Middle East.

Disruption-free cloud transformations are made possible through Cloud4C’s well-architected BFSI reference solution architectures, industry-specific controls, and compliance governance with central bank, local and global compliances like NESA, Dubai ISR, SAMA, GDPR, IRAP, RBI, MEITY, OJK, MAS and FedRamp etc. The proprietary SHOP™ platform at the backend powers automation driven migrations, modernisations, and management of multiple clouds and landscapes from a single pane of glass.

With FinOps, advanced cybersecurity, DRaaS, and digital transformation solutions tailored for the sector, Cloud4C enables FSIs, of any size and scale, to advance their mission-critical IT and technology transformations at zero risk and maximum ROI.

Visit www.cloud4c.com to learn more.

• Business Technology Review