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Just five years ago, the idea of using cloud services would have seemed wildly optimistic even to the most radical of businesses operating in the financial services sector. But cloud is no longer the new kid on the block. After becoming the word on everybody’s lips a few years ago, it has already plumbed what the Gartner Hype Cycle terms the ‘trough of disillusionment’; often experienced by new technologies as the doubters queue up to question the impact it can have. Cloud is already well on the way towards the ‘slope of enlightenment’, where even business sectors which are traditionally slow to adopt new technology, such as financial services, are now beginning to realise the benefits.

Challenger banks

The UK’s financial services sector is currently undergoing significant change. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, regulatory changes designed to stimulate competition in the market have made it easier to set up a new bank. Just two years later, Metro Bank became the first to be awarded a banking licence for 150 years. This new face on the high street is now also joined by a raft of other new names, including Starling and Hampden, which means it is now possible for customers to turn their backs on the traditional big players.

All of these new players on the market are distinct for another reason too – they are all embracing cloud. If you’ve ever glanced in the window of a Metro Bank branch, you will have noticed that there is an element of hot-desking from those who work in its open plan environment. This is possible because the bank is largely paperless, with customer records and bank functions being hosted in the cloud.

Having been born in the 21st century, these newcomers do not carry the burden of legacy systems and can hit the ground running. However, with careful planning and a clear strategy, there is no reason why the financial services industry as a whole can’t more readily embrace cloud.

Public and private cloud

At first glance, using public cloud services from the likes of Amazon and Google might be considered a risky approach due to tight regulation within the industry.

Each different country has its own legislation for the financial services industry, meaning they are free to give the go-ahead for cloud adoption within their own borders. Take the Netherlands, for example, where national bank ING has given use of Amazon Web Services the green light. Although the legal barrier is being removed from the path of some, a private cloud approach is still the more likely option for most financial services organisations. Private cloud offers greater control which is vital for financial services organisations concerned about security and compliance.

Barriers to overcome

Moving to cloud is not the giant leap some financial services firms might think it is; many are already using cloud apps as part of everyday operation without even realising. For instance, it is very common for marketing teams to use content delivery networks, which can be deemed a ‘cloud’ service.

The key is to incentivise the entire business to embrace cloud for both new and existing applications. Therefore it is important that operations, application owners and the business are all on the same page when it comes to establishing which applications should move to the cloud. In today’s competitive financial services environment, this really should be a question of agility rather than cost.

Map it out

Once everybody is on board, the focus of the business must now turn to making the move happen. This means identifying what applications are already in place, what form they take and whether or not they are capable of being migrated to a cloud environment.

Don’t forget that it will not be appropriate for everything to be moved to the cloud. Transaction processing, for example, may be one of the last things to move, if at all – the business case to move these applications from the mainframe would need to be compelling. In reality, within financial services organisations we see a 70/30 split between applications that could realistically move to the cloud and those that cannot. Financial services organisations need to set out a sensible, achievable roadmap for their cloud journey. This involves three key elements: setting up the right platform, migrating applications and integrating legacy assets.

It can typically take three to five years to move all necessary parts of the business across to cloud, so it’s important to have a comprehensive understanding of what to move, when to move and how to do it. Without that, financial services firms will struggle to make good on the promise of cloud.

Read more: Why financial firms are missing out by not embracing the cloud

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The big data technology landscape is varied and vast – and a new report from Forrester examines the key strands, with non-relational databases taking the bulk of the honours.

The report, claimed to be a first of its kind from the analyst firm titled Big Data Management Solutions Forecast 2016 to 2021, argues NoSQL and Hadoop will see the biggest growth during the five year period, with the markets growing 25.0% and 32.9% per year respectively. The analysts also claim that the big data technology space will grow at three times the rate of the overall technology market.

Forrester defines big data technology in six buckets; enterprise data warehousing, NoSQL, Hdaoop, big data integration, data virtualisation, and in-memory data fabric. The latter, a product which usually offers data, compute and service grids as well as an in-memory database, is predicted to grow at 29.2% annually over the coming five years.

Usage varies by industry, but the report notes that while telecommunications, professional services, finance and government are the largest users of these technologies now, the pharmaceutical, transport and primary production industries will be the quickest growing. Almost 40% of firms polled by Forrester say they are implementing and expanding their big data technology adoption, with another 30% planning to up their usage in the next 12 months.

One industry case study which utilises Hadoop in particular is Trulia, an online residential marketplace. On a given day, Trulia would crunch more than a terabyte of data, and cross reference it with a couple of petabytes of existing data to give their users the most accurate information possible.

With regards to NoSQL, a report from Gartner released in April this year around database management systems (DBMS) argued that for the five leaders – Basho, Couchbase, Datastax, MarkLogic and MongoDB – there was “still not much to write home about” in terms of revenue compared to the relational database behemoths.

The vendors will tell a different story, however. Couchbase, for instance, concluded a $30 million series F funding round back in March, with CEO Bob Wiederhold telling this publication that an IPO was not too far away. Yet the overall theme, according to both Gartner and Forrester, is that change is coming – it is just taking a while to get there.

“The complexity and richness of data is changing, along with exploding data volume and velocity. Unstructured data, such as text, tweets, graphs, and video, is an increasingly important source of information,” wrote Jennifer Adams, Forrester senior forecast analyst in a blog post. “Not surprisingly, we expect non-relational databases to be the fastest growing sector within big data management solutions.”

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