You can’t solve what you can’t see. Leaky pipes. Faulty wiring. Disconnected infrastructure. Whether we’re talking home repairs or digital transformation, the same principle applies. Even the best tools are nothing without a clear line of sight to consistently monitor performance.
I thought a lot about that reading IDC’s latest research this week. Everywhere you look, financial services organizations are racing to transform by modernizing their infrastructure. The pace is staggering—accelerated by pandemic-related disruption and evolving customer expectations. Still, the numbers around what banks haven’t yet achieved are even more jarring:
- Less than 40 percent of banks can actually see how well their modern infrastructure investments are performing across hybrid operating environments.
- More than 60 percent don’t have consistent service-level monitoring and reporting across hybrid and public cloud applications or services.
- Fewer than 30 percent have gone beyond simple monitoring to implement or optimize automation and orchestration.
That’s simply not enough. It doesn’t matter how powerful your equipment is if you can’t stop trouble as—or, ideally, before—it arises. To unlock the full return on investment (ROI) of a modern infrastructure over the long term, you need a seamless operating system (think of a powerfully automated cloud running behind the scenes) that can monitor your systems, show you how things are going in real time, and help you capitalize on any opportunities that surface.
Getting that balancing act right can create a host of different benefits. IDC tells us financial institutions rank improved customer experience as the number one upside of deploying this kind of operational workload to the cloud. That link between the infrastructure itself, and the broader customer experience (which drives revenue, profit growth, customer retention, and more) is an even greater reason to focus on the operations piece. In fact, IDC’s research shows that when infrastructure is managed well by the right digital operations strategy, it can:
- Improve operational resiliency and reduce risk
- Generate digital trust and stewardship
- Strengthen cybersecurity defenses
- Drive operational efficiencies
As we head into the pandemic recovery phase, it’s fair to say those are the drivers that financial services organizations need now. We don’t know how the next year will look, or the one after that. What I can tell you now is that resiliency, agility, digital trust, and strong cyber protection aren’t going out of style any time soon. By supporting the modern infrastructure with clear operational monitoring, you’ll be better prepared to navigate whatever comes next.
