Cloud-Monitor 2024: Financial Services

A spirit of optimism in the financial services industry: banks and insurance companies are confident about cloud usage. They have overcome their initial concerns about data protection and compliance. For many, the technologies have long been an integral part of their IT strategy. This is shown by our study entitled "Cloud Monitor: Financial Services", which is based on a representative company survey and has been conducted annually since 2012.

Dominance of the public cloud: While hybrid cloud models were still predominant in 2023, most banks and insurance companies now predominantly use public cloud solutions. As a result, financial institutions are also migrating more and more of their productive applications to the public cloud.

Cloud security: Many financial service providers are also already in the planning and conversion phase towards next-gen or hybrid architectures. These offer more flexibility and better security options. In this context, zero trust strategies are also being integrated in order to meet the complex security requirements.

Cost management: Cloud costs and their handling in terms of transparency and predictability remain a task to be mastered - not least against the backdrop of any expenditure on shadow IT. This shows how important effective cost management and suitable financial strategies are.

AI technologies: In addition to established cloud services, modern AI technologies such as large language models (LLMs) are gaining in importance. Financial service providers are increasingly integrating solutions from providers such as OpenAI and Google, with German providers such as Aleph Alpha also being used.

Sovereign clouds: Sovereign clouds are also becoming increasingly important in the financial sector, as they can help to meet the EU's strict data protection requirements. However, their implementation in practice is not yet very advanced. This is probably due to the lack of competitiveness compared to established providers.