A managed services approach can play a key role in helping financial firms overcome the challenges they may face today as they migrate over to a cloud-based approach.
Firms will, for example, need to ensure they are picking the right open source projects where they will attain optimum value and also ensure they use the right open source tools. There will, after all, often be a range of competing tools available to them which could potentially be applied to a specific problem and choosing the right one is critical. Some technologies, such as Python, Spark and Cassandra, have caught enormous momentum. Others may have lost it. So it is important that firms do their normal sourcing homework.
Aside from these more general challenges, financial services firms will be likely to have more specific data management issues that they need to address. They should be aware that there may be constraints on where they can put their data. They may, for example, need to store sensitive customer information in the cloud outside certain countries in order to avoid breaking any privacy or data protection laws. They may have concerns about keeping proprietary algorithms outside infrastructure that they alone completely control.
They may well also want to use NoSQL database technology that came out of open source for data management purposes. Cassandra is good for time series data modelling, while Spark is effective as a data processing framework. As financial services firms look to optimize their data usage, data scientists need to be equipped with the requisite data preparation and data quality solutions as well as with the tools they would need to analyze the data and test their data models.
In addressing a move to open source, firms should look to leverage the help of curated, open source solution providers that both understand the cloud and use open source themselves and therefore benefit from some of the advancements that have been made in order to deliver cost-effective scalable solutions.
By partnering with a commercial provider in such a way, firms will also be able to access support from providers. In other words instead of taking on the onus for leveraging the technology alone, the onus will be on the provider to deliver the underlying technology which will often also involve using various cloud infrastructure providers to help financial services clients optimise their cloud infrastructure deployment and get the most they can out of open source technology today.
