Data, The Cloud, and Business Operations

By Michael Asher, President and COO, RFA

The cloud is revolutionizing how financial services firms work, and the way in which they use data to benefit their business operations.

This technology offers organizations a fully scalable and secure platform to grow upon. It can host numerous programs and functions, as well as reinforce a business’ resilience to significant worldwide disruption.

We saw this first hand during the pandemic. Overnight, the entire industry essentially moved in to their BCP’s as offices were deserted and teams were forced to work from home. This of course brought about significant operational and logistical challenges for firms. At the same time, with many markets in freefall, significant investment opportunities were being created amid the disruption that managers wanted to capitalize on.

We worked with clients to maintain workflow through this significant worldwide disruption. We achieved a fully remote working model, which requires a cloud-based network. Data is centralized in a cloud-based warehouse, using data management tools to effectively harness all of a firm’s vital information into one central point.

Crucially, having the right cloud architecture is not just about resilience and staying operational. Cloud technology has provided firms with choice of working model, and businesses are evaluating where they can improve efficiency after adjusting to remote working. This is where digital transformation comes to the fore with centralization playing a key part of this. Data can be accessed in a more efficient manner, often through a central remote dashboard with core controls and policies – a read only dashboard is far more secure that sending out PDFs or sharing spreadsheets.

This what makes a front to back-end solution so important. The right solution can drive efficiency and productivity across a firm’s operations, delivering diagnostics on how virtual machines, containers, and cloud infrastructures are being utilized and the associated costs.

RFA’s white glove support solution leverages RFA’s in-house DevOps team, giving us the ability to create self-service tools for our clients and configuring automated reporting to regulatory and industry standards. Particular to business operations and the championing of resilience, our cloud management service includes several features:

• Automated approval workflows
• Policy-driven access management
• Continuous integration
• SaaS platform security management

The technical resilience provided by cloud solutions allows business operation, deal and work flow additional resistance to outside events, allowing you to work as usual and provide clients and investors with a seamless service. Now is the time  to build upon this resilience and explore more digital and centralized ways of operating.