In the last decade, “Digital Transformation”has been the buzzword for all businesses. While cloud computing is continuing to make massive advances, hi-trust industries have traditionally shied away from public cloud adoption.
Highly regulated industries like Financial Institutes, Healthcare establishments, Life Science & Pharmaceuticals are heavily scrutinised due to the large amount of confidential customer information they possess. Information security, compliance, ecosystem management, integration and control preferences are exceedingly high in this sector. As a result, many regulated applications in the public cloud today are not mission critical or do not directly port core systems and databases.
Unfortunately, misconceptions or lack of understanding of cloud in the past, has also hindered the public cloud adoption in this sector. Following table highlights some of the prominent myths.
Figure 1 Myths hindering cloud adoption
In the last few years, we could see a greater number of decision makers educating themselves on cloud and debunking myths surrounding it. There is a marked enthusiasm to embrace cloud, in the quest of improved services, faster innovation and long-term cost benefits.
As per Economic Times, the global market size of the fintech sector is expected to reach $124.3 Bn by the end of 2025, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 23.84%. And cloud computing is poised to play a major role in shaping the future of FinTech. In USA, 19 of the top 20 banks have already announced public cloud initiatives.
The global healthcare cloud computing market is projected to register at a CAGR of around 17.2% during the period 2020 to 2027.
According to Gartner, cloud computing is one of the top three investment priorities for almost a third of companies. It is now eminent that migrating to the public cloud accelerates realization of business goals.
Figure 2 Benefits of Cloud adoption
As the business case is made for broader public cloud adoption, controlled institutions will have to evaluate a variety of considerations that could influence not only where they deploy technology, but also how they deploy it.
When architecting cloud infrastructure, some key design principles need to be aligned with:
Designing for security to gain trust
It is undeniable that customer trust is built through secure systems. With sophisticated hacking mechanisms, relying only on strong identity access management is an expensive blunder. Cloud security should have a multi-layered and granular approach. While the focus should be on making the systems impenetrable, enough controls should be added to reduce the impact of the blast radius of an unforeseen security incident. Security incident deterrent controls, preventive controls, detective and monitoring controls and last but not the least, corrective action plan make up the cloud security.
Establishing Risk Management and Compliance in public cloud
Majority of the Hi-Trust organizations are required to comply with regulatory requirements and the cloud infrastructure handling sensitive data and operations forms the crux of the audit. Plotting a route through all the risks and regulatory complexities, continuous evaluation and updating of risk and compliance management framework will ensure that the business gets the benefits it set to gain from cloud adoption.
Cost Management
Financial management is the holy grail for most of the organizations and applies to cloud computing as well. Observe cloud spending trends, set budgets and gauge the overall expenditure in achieving the desired business goals. Get an organized visibility into your cloud costs, measure overall efficiency, optimize the spend with right-sizing and adopt a consumption model.
Enabling agility to innovate faster
Cloud agility ensures that businesses are empowered to innovate faster. Quick adoption of resources required to rapidly develop, test and launch innovations, with security controls to identify vulnerabilities early-on is what CI/CD pipeline offers.
Final Thoughts
AWS is a market leader and broadly adopted cloud platform offering 200+ services addressing each and every need for a robust cloud environment. AWS has been named as a leader for the 11th consecutive year in 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services. The Well-Architected Framework defined by AWS helps you learn architectural best practices for designing and operating secure, reliable, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in the AWS Cloud. AWS has audit-friendly service features for PCI, ISO, SOC and other compliance standards.
Comprinno is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, providing trusted cloud orchestration and management consulting expertise, solutions and services since 2013, that help organizations cut through the chaos, adopt cloud and make better cybersecurity decisions. Through our rich experience of successful partnerships with high-trust industry clients, Comprinno has numerous insights to share and can responsibly accelerate your cloud journey.
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