During last week’s WeMeeting23 event in Marrakech, Payment Expert caught up with Managing Director of service network firm EY – Milind Khatavkar – to discuss the possibilities for companies to move their databases to hybrid and multi-cloud networks.
PE: What have been some of your advice and use cases to firms to move away from legacy systems?
MK: Cloud migration is not just saving on infrastructure cost but it’s more about scalability, agility, speed up the development, enhanced security, business resiliency and more.
For cloud migration from Legacy card platforms, you need to think of the whole technology ecosystem that includes product processing solutions and integrated supporting systems.
Typically for the bank, they have 100+ applications that are running on a single monolith platform, which support the entire solution as a full-fledged system. For such cases, it’s important to review each application and analyse each one of them, keeping the desired end state in mind. If for some small applications it does not make sense to move to the cloud, then just keep on premises on commodity technology stack (to move away from monolith) and migrate rest to cloud.
So typically, it will be a hybrid approach that uses both an on-premises data centre and the cloud, which can allow greater control and security over sensitive data while still taking advantage of the scalability and flexibility of cloud computing.
So Card platforms, core banking are some of the use cases for the cloud migrations initiatives. Most of the banks use mainframe-based solutions and they were developed a few decades back with customizations to maintain till date. These are certainly prospective candidates for Cloud migration and modernization.
Another point for banks to consider is multi-cloud in a single architecture. So, rather than relying on a single provider for all the services, use multiple cloud computing services from different cloud providers. This approach can offer greater flexibility, resilience, and cost-effectiveness by leveraging the unique strengths of different cloud platforms.
Some of the countries have mandated multi-cloud architecture for financial services.
PE: For a greater sense of security?
MK: For the banks, definitely!
Cloud security refers to security across data, infrastructure, applications, and the integrity of cloud environments.
The Cloud has a “shared responsibility” model on cloud security framework, which determines which cloud components are the cloud provider’s responsibility and which are the customer’s/bank’s.
Banks need to scale up security as they scale up migration to the cloud.
Cloud security includes identity and access management, governance, network and device security, security monitoring and alerting, disaster recovery, business continuity planning, and legal compliance.
Banks can accomplish Cloud security through a combination of data security, identity and access management (IAM), data retention, business continuity planning and governance, such as threat prevention, detection and mitigation policies.
Specialised team of experts required to govern and manage the security aspects of the cloud.
PE: How do you think ChatGPT can enable the banking/payments industry?
MK: One use case that I’m personally following for ChatGPT is using it for call centres. For instance, beyond the chatbot solutions at call centres where human interaction becomes important, ChatGPT can learn from the actions, response which a human agent takes while resolving the call and learn to repeat it for future calls without human intervention.
And beyond that, ChatGPT can replicate those learnings and responses across the rest of the Chatbots.
So in future, it’s not just a dumb chatbot call centre which just learns from what information you feed it. ChatGPT comes in and it starts learning everytime the call comes, it learns and can use it for the next call.
I am sure in future you will see more use cases of the ChatGPT in banking.
