No two cloud hosting solutions are in fact the same – and selecting a cloud hosting provider should be more industry-focused and based on specific business needs than the anticipated virtual mix of public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructure.
The above is even more important in the context of dealing with financial data as a core business operation. For accounting, insurance and financial institutions, the cloud hosting provider is essential to their success.
In this post, I am going to cover a few key considerations these enterprises have to make when choosing their cloud provider, because, after all, this relationship is as important as any professional partnership.
Resource-intensive Workloads
Financial operators and accountants generally use more applications at once than most user types, and these applications are database-driven than those employed by normal users, which require additional resources, bandwidth and storage capacity.
Financial enterprises need to decide how multiple applications are hosted and connected to the cloud and whether these include critical internal operations and/or clients’ databases, as well as the type and sensitivity of information stored to calibrate the cloud mix.
That said, the workload, devices and system requirements will determine the right mix of cloud network solutions and will give the cloud hosting provider the opportunity to recommend the ideal infrastructure.
Performance and Flexibility
High performance with minimum or less downtime means the cloud hosting solution must be capable of running apps simultaneously and ideally on various devices, even remotely.
Otherwise, the overall system performance will be substandard and inflexible and slow critical financial operations these businesses depend on daily.
The cloud hosting provider needs to guarantee network performance on demanding workloads. Think minimum system latency and maximum transfer speeds to transmit data from various remote locations and access the relevant data on-demand from desktop and mobile devices.
Network Security and Redundancy
Perhaps the most important aspect of hosting and manipulating financial data on a constant basis for different clients is the level of security a cloud hosting solution can provide.
Financial enterprises should consider cloud network providers who can host applications and data redundantly in multiple data centres and on various security-enforced servers.
They should pay special attention to the configuration of automatic backups between multiple point locations and ensure all resources are kept on infrastructure engineered for redundancy, preferably with recent independent third-party evaluations.
The most important aspect of financial operations is a seamless and secure connection – which is why it is important to select a provider with the relevant experience, capabilities and offerings to support financial enterprises now and well into the future.
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