It has been over five decades since Mick Jagger & Keith Richards penned the verse: “Hey, you, get off of my cloud. Don't hang around cause two's a crowd.”
They were speaking figuratively, of course.
But had The Rolling Stones traded in their iconic sequin jumpsuits for suit jackets and IT jobs in the financial services sector, they might have been quite visionary for their time. Because the cloud, in the technical sense, wasn’t even a thing back then.
In contrast, today cloud computing is embraced in every corner of the world and favoured across a range of industries, including financial services organisations (FSOs). Although historically FSOs have been cautious to adopt cloud services, they’re now shifting their mindset.
Cloud adoption has gone from being a lofty utopian idea to (as Sid Nag, Research Vice President for Gartner aptly points out) quite ‘mainstream.’ In fact, according to Gartner research, the public cloud services market is expected to reach $266.4 billion by the end of this year, up from $227.8 billion just last year.
While the cloud was already on an upward trajectory (and increasingly a “hot” agenda item at FSO board meetings), the trend has really taken flight during the recent pandemic. Evidence of this? At NICE, I’ve personally seen organisations that have executed five years’ worth of cloud planning and strategy in a matter of months!
Even organisations that would traditionally have taken a more conservative approach have accelerated their transition to cloud technologies quite significantly. In the space of just five months, we’ve gone from conservative talk about cloud adoption, to the cloud being the “new norm.” Further evidence of this is NICE’s 30 percent year-over-year growth in cloud revenues.
In fact, I’d hazard to guess that the most recent uptake of cloud services isn’t really so much a trend, as a necessity. Throughout this pandemic, businesses have had to quickly mobilize to stand up remote workforces and furthermore ensure that regulated employees were set up to work from home compliantly. This is where cloud services (especially within the Communications Compliance technology area) can really excel – by helping firms quickly scale up to record and supervise regulated employees working from home, irrespective of the modalities they use to communicate (e.g. mobile, unified communications).
Want to learn more about this topic? I invite you to tune in to NICE’s Interactions Live virtual conference which took place on September 2020 and is now available on demand, Simply click here to register for free.
