The adoption of cloud-based applications and services in the financial markets sector continues to gather pace across the front, middle and back office. It is now growing at over 30% - in part, due to the global pandemic, which forced many firms to accelerate their cloud migration strategies.

The cloud can, of course, offer clear benefits to financial institutions. One often cited is cost reduction, particularly through optimisation of infrastructure. But there are plenty of other benefits, including:

• the speed at which cloud solutions can be deployed
• the improved user experience and convenience 
• the elasticity and scalability that the cloud provides
• the availability of DevOps environments
• the interoperability and open nature of cloud-based applications

So, it’s not surprising that firms are increasingly looking to capitalise on these benefits.

The financial markets environment is complex, and transitioning to the cloud isn’t easy. It’s important to secure exec sponsorship too, which is beneficial to the migration journey.

Firms shouldn’t underestimate the costs and complexity of migrating their technology stacks to the cloud, particularly when attempting to perform the migration themselves. Many firms have built up a complex mesh of infrastructure to support their analytics, pricing, trading, risk, settlement, and other operational functions.

It’s highly unrealistic to expect to be able to just ‘lift and shift’ these functions to the cloud.

A critical early step in the cloud transformation journey is for firms to clearly map out their appropriate cloud strategy. That means working out where to use public cloud, where to use private cloud, and which applications and data need to remain in-house or on-premises.

High-performance trading and real-time market data technologies, for example, are unlikely candidates for the public cloud. On the other hand, data analytics, regulatory reporting and end-user applications may be more appropriate for cloud-hosted platforms.

Implementing the appropriate cloud strategy doesn’t have to be onerous however. The process can be greatly streamlined by working with an infrastructure provider who's already done the groundwork and offers an integrated solution for accessing all the required endpoints, through a single, secure network.