The COVID-19 pandemic has made one thing clear: We will be living and working more on the cloud than we ever imagined. For firms worldwide that have operated for over a year under work-from-home mandates, country lockdowns, and volatile demand for products and services, the transition to a virtual office carries an added urgency beyond economic survival to designing for long-term corporate resilience and business continuity.
Fortunately for most firms, the digital shift had already begun with the widespread adoption of the internet for business use in the late 1990s and the subsequent steady digitization of tasks. In more recent years, cloud computing has become a massive part of global commerce, thanks to its capacity to strengthen security, store massive datasets, provide suites of software applications, and deliver analytics, networking, and other high-value services.
Banks and other financial institutions (FIs) have followed suit. A 2020 survey of US banks by the research firm Celent finds that “19 of the top 20 banks … [had] already announced public cloud initiatives,” even as “fintech challenger banks and smaller financial institutions” were using the public cloud for core banking systems.1 Before COVID-19, many banks and other FIs had announced plans to or had partly migrated to the cloud. In mid-2020, 95 percent of surveyed banks reported that they had already begun this transition, according to a report by Accenture. Still, most had only taken baby steps, and the clouds they referred to were their own private virtual networks, or VPNs.
