Finzsoft secures financial assets with hybrid cloud strategy
New Zealand-based financial software provider Finzsoft Solutions recently moved its core and vertical banking applications into the cloud to be able to offer clients -- mainly banks and financial institutions, such as St George Bank -- its solutions as a service.
The company signed a five-year cloud agreement with IBM to move its sovereign finance and banking applications to the IBM Cloud, which is hosted at IBM's datacentres located in Auckland and Wellington. Under the agreement, Finzsoft also leverages IBM Cloud Managed Infrastructure Services for New Zealand, as well as infrastructure from SoftLayer, an IBM company.
Speaking to ZDNet, Finzsoft managing director Andrew Holliday said the objective of a cloud-based offering means it will speed up deployment of its solutions, reduce costs, and enhance security, while meeting market demand.
"We're seeing the local market is changing dynamically, so we need to be able to respond to that. Clients are more sophisticated; they are demanding greater mobility for cross performance, and a lot more intuitive experience," he said.
"Obviously, with greater regulatory pressure, your customers want granular up-to-date customer-level data. With that comes an increasingly constant challenge to be responsive, secure, and well managed in what is really a global interconnected world.
"For us, it is imperative we have an infrastructure that is tier one, and would allow us to respond to that, particularly with regards to Finzsoft as it increases its penetration in the tier one banking sector, both domestically and internationally.
"A tier one infrastructure will allow us to compete in that environment. The outcomes we really see come from it is that it will speed up the deployment of solutions, it will provide enterprise-level security, stability, availability to our customers and internal team, and it will also increase our agility to respond to opportunities and issues."
The decision complements and forms part of Finzsoft's hybrid cloud strategy, which is the most fitting infrastructure for the company, Holliday said.
"We've adopted a hybrid cloud rather than 100 percent private or public. The hybrid strategy allows us to meet specific security and data sovereignty concerns that relate particularly to our banking customers," he said.
As for whether the company will ever consider going completely private or public, Holliday confirmed that it would not be appropriate for the business or its customers.
"The 100 percent has lower access times, and lower latency in comparison to public cloud services. By adopting a hybrid cloud strategy, you can retain some of the specific business functions in-house, and we have expertise to make that a very extensive part of our business proposition."
Holliday added that once fully deployed, the cloud will reduce the time it takes to stand up new environments from what would take -- in the "old world" -- weeks and months to days.
At the same time, it has enabled the business to overcome constraints it previously faced when it was operating with its former infrastructure.
"We were looking for experts to run the process and best of breed, but also while retaining larger components was a key attribute for us," he said.
"Those factors allow us to be more responsive, agile, and to be flexible without being constrained by infrastructure. The infrastructure can be a very limiting factor for both ourselves and our clients, so the IBM hybrid cloud strategy enables us to move around that."