In this new digitalization era, the pace of digital adoption has becoming incredibly fast each day. Wikipedia describes Digital Transformation (DX) as not necessarily about digital technology, but about the fact that technology, which is digital, allows people to solve their traditional problems. And they prefer this digital solution to the old solution. The transformation stage means that digital usages inherently enable new types of innovation and creativity in a particular domain, rather than simply enhance and support traditional methods. This applies to financial domain as well. Financial world has been rocked with new innovation for the past years. These include digital eWallet, cryptocurrency, eCommerce payment gateway, Artificial Intelligence for loan and etc.
These can be done in cloud platform as cloud such as Azure, AWS and even Alibaba provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). This is due to the large cluster set of latest hardware equipment that have been set up purposely to enable newer coding immediately than having to build platform first such as web, mobile, blockchain and databases.
However, financial sector across the world is bound by tight regulation such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), Information security management (ISO 27001) and local central bank requirement. As government and local authorities (such as tax agencies and courts) do not have authority across the border, they need to keep the financial records in local country. This is called as data sovereignty. These also include backups and a long retention period of minimum 7 years in most countries.
In SouthEast Asia, these major cloud providers only have presence in developed countries (such as Singapore) and typically only 1 region per country. This makes financial companies having hard time to complies to regulation for both production and backup data. To make it worst, the benefits of geo-redundancy (high availabilities across countries) which duplicate data across other region without any knowledge and instruction these financial tenant has become an enemy to them.
Cloudify.Asia, through its business unit Consumable Hybrid Cloud (CHC) enables major cloud technologies to be used locally, thus complying with the complex regulation and law. These include Azure Stack (Microsoft Azure platform), Apsara Stack (Alibaba Cloud platform) and upcoming AWS Outpost (Amazon Cloud platform) to be available on premises.
Azure Stack infrastructure for instance is already complied with PCI-DSS and CSA-CCM from day one (link) on its technical controls. Financial institution can place the cloud infrastructure in their data center and further complying to their existing audit requirements as well. Cloudify.Asia, with its certified partners will deploy and manage the infrastructure for them. This include pay per use billing (entire infrastructure and licensing), capacity planning, infra regular updates and creation of plans & offers. Now, they can enjoy the benefit of establish cloud technology in the comfort of their datacenters and pay only for the resources that they use.
Cloudify.Asia also connects the said cloud platform to public cloud for non-sensitive data in single portal. This allows financial developers to use the latest cloud services such as analytics and artificial intelligence for testing and development. Single portal will have entire view of usage per tenant, segregated by login credentials as the technology such as Azure Stack is multi-tenanted by default.
We also work closely with large cloud service providers and telecommunication companies in the region, shall they need to have visibilities of data replication for disaster recovery purposes. These providers build their cloud platform in Tier III (3) datacenters to be used in local countries as well. Being cloud providers’ provider, we work closely on both ends to position right workloads into the right cloud. This include seamless migration from virtualization solution such as HyperV and VMware to the hybrid cloud platform & private cloud platform.
With this methodology, financial world now can enjoy the speed of digitalization with cloud platform that complies to regulation and complex auditing.