The cloud and the financial services industry have had a rocky road together, and for good reason. Other than perhaps the health industry, the financial services industry is one of the most heavily regulated sectors in the economy. Despite all of the advantages of the cloud, worries about confidentiality and regulatory compliance make banks skittish to move. But that appears to be changing as cloud services and security mature.
From a content marketing standpoint, the advantage of using cloud computing is the ability to generate new software tools quickly without a large capital investment. Cloud computing allows companies to try new tools in a safe virtualized server away from the rest of their more sensitive data. This allows businesses to become more agile and try new things without worrying about rocking the boat.
In fact, content marketing is a great place for a bank to start working with the cloud. Here’s an example. A financial services company wants to track customer behavior on their banking website to see which services are getting used and which are being ignored for future marketing. On a separate cloud server, a tool for scraping webpage behavior and a database are set up and secured away from the rest of the infrastructure. The bank’s marketing team can then use analytics tools to find patterns and make recommendations for future marketing campaigns. By using the cloud, the marketing team can afford to try out several different tools, or make their own, without interfering with the rest of the data.
By making a small investment that can have a big ROI in marketing, it makes a great case study to convince company leaders that moving to the cloud is in their best interest. Cloud adoption has other advantages such as flexible infrastructure, reduced costs, and reduced time for provisioning. However, if you do plan on doing this there are important things to keep in mind. Anyone seeking to negotiate with a cloud provider must know all of the regulatory and confidentiality requirements and question the provider sufficiently to find out if they know them as well. Privacy and data destruction concerns must also be sorted out. A single data breach at a financial institution can be ruinous, which is why banks are so skittish about leaping into the cloud.
In March of 2015, the Cloud Security Alliance did a survey on how the financial industry is adopting cloud services. Over 60% of those surveyed said that their cloud strategy was still being constructed and none of them said that they plan on moving completely to a public cloud. Most of the respondents plan to use a mixture of in-house IT, private, and public clouds. That mixture is important, because it means that some in the financial industry are becoming more comfortable with transitioning away from only thinking of private clouds.
If your bank isn’t budging on cloud computing, whether due to a strict no-cloud policy or worries about capital costs or privacy, consider approaching it from a content marketing standpoint.