Empowering Banking CIOs to lead from the front: Banking Community Cloud

Cloud4C Powers 16 Indian Banks through its community cloud

Banking CIOs perform a plethora of activities in addition to just managing IT infra and Apps. They are required to embrace disruptive technologies to creating opportunities, gain competitive advantage and enhance efficiencies to benefit the organization. Besides, they are under immense pressure to perform besides powering business with IT and deliver higher performance. Their challenge however has been that while major time of time is invested in running IT infrastructure and applications the technology providers haven’t been able to offered a full industry solution they need including a single SLA ,  compliance, security and derive other benefits that a cloud ecosystem has to offer. A Community cloud solves this major challenge of a Banking CIO.

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“Banks even with the most efficient of CIOs traditionally take at least 8 to 9 months when launching a new branch from an IT standpoint. With the Cloud4C community Cloud, CIOs have been successful in launching completely IT ready Bank branches in as less as 3 weeks.”

Sridhar Pinnapureddy
Founder and CEO
Cloud4C and CtrlS.

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Cloud4C – a sister organization of CtrlS Datacenters has designed a Banking Community Cloud to tackle the core challenges faced by the Banking Industry from the IT standpoint, giving them complete control with reduced complexities, bullet proof security, increased uptime and lighting fast time to market. At the same time, a 40 percent decrease in pricing makes it an absolute no-brainer for any Banking CIO looking to make a difference in today’s competitive landscape.

The Challenges of Banking System today

The Indian Banking System has a history of struggling to cater to the ever increasing customer base, changing industry guidelines. This results is a constant struggle for BFSI organizations when maintaining business continuity when upgrading to newer technologies, bringing in new applications or opening up new branches. Banking CIOs constantly face issues arising out of technology that becomes obsolete as quickly as it comes to the market. This brings up challenges around reinvestment of costs time and again, regulatory needs and compliance complexities, and the ever increasing security needs.

All these challenges coupled together give CIOs a tough time in maintaining business continuity and aligning the organizational goals and targets to the transforming technology and competitive market landscape. Over time, banking IT infrastructures has become extremely complex and even the biggest names in the Indian BFSI sector cannot remain unaffected by the challenges in addressing industry specific needs in a timely and cost effective manner.

How the Community Cloud Empowers Banking CIOs

The Cloud4C Banking Community Cloud which they aptly nickname as the ‘Bank-in-a-Box Solution’ boasts unprecedented credentials as being the World’s 1st Tier-4 Banking Community Cloud, that delivers a reliable, on-demand self-service with rapid elasticity and measured services. In simple words, the Banking Community Cloud enables Banks to optimize costs whilst maintaining desired levels of security, compliance management and efficiencies.

Cloud4C and CtrlS Founder, Sridhar Pinappureddy explains, “This unique next generation “Bank in a Box” service with enhanced functionality is specifically tailored to meet the burgeoning digital needs of the financial industry with strong underlying IT Governance to ensure effective and efficient usage of banking information technology infrastructure.”

Traditionally, a Bank requires around 25 diverse applications for processes and offerings including ATMs, Credit and Debit Cards, Mobile Apps etc. to serve their business needs, apart from the core banking and regular business apps like CRM and HR. The emphasis on security is vital for the Banking vertical which deals with the most important assets of their customers like their life savings and investments that ensure a better future in today’s economic scenario.

In order to ensure bullet proof protection for these IT applications from disasters like data loss and security breaches, banks usually require more than 40 controls using over 20+ security tools – all of them have been incorporated into Cloud4C banking community cloud. The biggest headache that Banking CIOs face when ensuring an up to date security framework is deploying and management of these diverse applications which traditionally requires engagement of a large number of technology partners and service providers, along with an adequately skilled in-house team to manage them – again here, Cloud4C helps them by managing the overall infrastructure backed by managed services to ensure the Banking CIOs focus on their core business and engage their mind on strategy and transformation, leaving the mundane activities to Cloud4C and its team of cloud experts.

The Cloud4C Banking Community Cloud empowers the Banking CIOs by substantially reducing this complexity by providing all the required applications on their banking community cloud, managing their infrastructure and applications with a single SLA. The Banking Community Cloud offerings include the entire array of functionalities needed by the CIO of a large National Bank right from test & dev, application administration, complete security, accent management, among others, giving the customer a conclusive deal with market benefits in cost savings and uptime.

Perhaps the biggest benefit for Banking CIOs deploying the Banking Cloud is the unbelievably efficient time to market. Banks even with the most efficient of CIOs traditionally take at least 8 to 9 months when launching a new branch from an IT standpoint. With the Cloud4C Banking Community Cloud, CIOs have been successful in launching completely IT ready Bank branches in as less as 3 weeks.

The CtrlS Promise: Faster, Better and More Secure

Coupled with the substantial reduction in time to market and better control over applications, Cloud4C promises a 40 percent decrease in pricing and which has made the Cloud4C Banking Community Cloud has come across as a no brainer for a number of Banking CIOs in the country. The biggest USP of the Cloud4C Community Cloud offering is the specific customizations that render it apt for the customer’s specific needs.

Sridhar estimates that currently the community cloud easily brings up savings by 30 to 40 percent and improved uptime in applications. This is music for the ears of Banking CIOs. Sridhar explains, “They are now happy with uptime up to three 9s and we are now reaching up to four 9s: it’s improving day by day.”

The Cloud4C banking community cloud has been making good strides recently with Indian Banks subscribing to the Banking Community Cloud and operating their banks successfully. As per Sridhar, the Banking Cloud has over already powered 16 Banks in India, Middle East and Europe and the numbers are growing at a steady pace.

Sridhar opines, “All of this happened in the midst of a highly competitive marketplace. So that’s our strategy: continue to differentiate and provide a different value proposition all together. There is nobody else in India or globally doing the same thing as of now. I believe this (community cloud) will be very big in the coming years.”