Applications of Cloud Computing within Assurance
Steve Jobs once said, ‘I don’t need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the server faster… carrying around these non-connected computers is byzantine by comparison’.
Indeed, computing in the era of industry 4.0 is faster than ever before, irrespective of where the computing is performed. Spending on cloud computing will be 6x compared to the traditional IT spending through 2020. In such a high growth scenario, both, financial institutions and assurance providers are under pressure to implement cloud computing. Cloud computing services such as SaaS, PaaS, IaaS provide pay-as-you-go facility. Organisations need not pay for applications, platforms or even infrastructure (computing memory, CPU, etc.) They can host their data on the cloud and use cloud services as and when required. This saves a lot of up-front investment which can be utilized elsewhere effectively. This also helps assurance providers get on-the-go access to the necessary checks and balances, thereby reducing time, effort and money for both, the institution and the service provider.
For large organisations, moving entire enterprise to cloud in a short span is impossible. Hence, they rely on a mix of public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud and on-premise legacy implementations. This leads to many grey areas for the assurance world like cloud security and regulatory compliance. With the growing adoption of public cloud, resources are shared by multiple organisations. In the event of any updates or patches on the cloud, there can be potential impact on the data stored. In case of any service failure, backup and recovery of the data might take time. The security of backup data also needs to be ensured. Sub-contracting of few services to other small cloud providers can also lead to vendor risks such as lawsuits and SEC probes. Hence, compliance with national regulations (like GDPR in the European region) become utmost necessary.
With standardization of regulations and increased cloud security, the future might hold widespread adoption of cloud services like analytics and AI in the cloud.
The trend now is more towards having virtualized apps, virtualized systems, rather than hosting on our own. Reduction in cost and support is the key to this trend. However, as rightly mentioned data privacy is of utmost importance e.g. Most of the companies today started using Office365, which is a SaaS model, however, Microsoft has limited Azure DC's available per country, so it might be a possibility that the Exchange data for Germany might actually reside in the UK. This is where the geofencing based data chain model is being looked at to restrict data travel outside a specific region.