Meeting the Demanding Data Storage Needs of the Financial Services Industry

With users now able to do most anything online from paying bills to buying stocks and using multiple devices, the need for secure and efficient network storage is more essential than ever for financial institutions. Excluding IT itself, the banking and financial services industry spends more on IT than any other industry and a large chunk of this spending is dedicated to data storage and analysis in order to maintain high security standards and the speed that consumers demand.

Changing Consumer Behavior

Analysts estimate that between 80% and 90% of bank data is unstructured data, most of which comes from various types of customer interactions from call centers, email, social media, ATMs and more. Banks must process and analyze this data in order to remain competitive and provide adequate customer service. Because the consumer no longer uses one bank to conduct all financial activities, banks must increasingly rely on Big Data to get an accurate picture of the consumer’s needs.

Government Regulations

Not only does the consumer raise the bar for financial institutions and financial services data storage, but the government does as well. Dodd-Frank regulations impose an even greater demand on major financial institutions, requiring them to take a horizontal view of trading risk. Obtaining these analyses requires the integration of financial data from various silos across the institution from different capture systems, several times a day. Per these regulations, financial institutions are also required to store at least ten years of data. Data must be stored for backup, disaster recovery and archiving, all while keeping redundant copies to a minimum for purposes of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Nfina’s Hybrid Cloud Solutions

With rising IT costs, moving your IT infrastructure completely to the public cloud to keep up with industry demands regarding financial data is the least desirable solution. Public cloud solutions are expensive, complex and are less flexible. To help keep costs down, many financial institutions are turning to hybrid cloud and/or cloud storage solutions. Cloud storage is synonymous with outsourcing, which comes with its own set of problems, not to mention security issues. For these reasons, hybrid cloud solutions are a win-win for regional and community banks, credit unions, and financial institutions. These solutions are both efficient and cost-effective and help financial institutions meet the demands of an increasingly challenging industry.

Nfina’s Hybrid Cloud solutions are the perfect alternative to the public hyperscale cloud, offering more benefits than the public cloud without the cost and complexity. Nfina customers save up to 50% more with Nfina’s hybrid multi-cloud solutions versus public cloud solutions.

Many regional and community banks and financial institutions spend less on security and DR plan development because they believe it is too expensive and is designed for enterprise level budgets. Fortunately, Nfina Hybrid Cloud solutions are not only more effective, but they are also economical enough to be affordable for businesses of any size and make it simple and easy to safeguard business continuity. Making sure critical data is protected, and accessible is crucial to disaster recovery. Nfina’s Hybrid Cloud solutions allow you to recover your data no matter where it resides, recover on-premises and from the cloud. Nfina-View software provides monitoring on-prem and cloud, failover, rollback, and DR testing. Failover and rollback are simple single click operations and do not require rebuilding and repopulating data.

Don’t waste your time thinking about how you will recover from a natural disaster or cyberattak. Nfina strengthens your platform with our Hybrid Cloud solution. Business continuity is built-in, allowing our team to deal with any unforeseeable event rapidly keeping your operations up and running. Nfina’s Hybrid Cloud combines on-site virtual machines (VMs) with cluster-to-cluster replication along with off-site storage for backup and disaster recovery. We also include Managed Services that allows your business to off-load IT operations to us or your Nfina MSP Partner, enabling you to focus on your business goals while we deal with the challenges of an optimized IT environment. It’s flexible, we are able to customize a hybrid cloud solution to fit each bank or financial institution’s individual architecture requirements ensuring proper financial security compliance with international, federal, and local laws, industry standards and advisory regulations.