What’s more, there’s the need to respect client confidentiality and comply with multinational privacy laws and regulatory obligations. Wariness of being locked in with a vendor located in a foreign jurisdiction encourages the preference for digital sovereignty, which can complicate use of the public cloud since most hyperscalers are US-headquartered. The Schrems II ruling and subsequent EU-US Data Privacy Framework only strengthens GDPR compliance expectations while the recently enacted Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) hastens the urgency for banks and other financial institutions to rethink their data and IT strategies.
And yet, the cloud has a lot to offer asset management, a line of business that is highly dependent on industry-specific software applications . Serving as the cornerstones of their sensitive operations, these monolithic applications manage, control, and secure what amounts to hundreds of billions of euros accrued over long-term investments. For the applications to run smoothly, their platform needs to process enormous amounts of data. This involves running calculations with huge feedback loops and accommodating complex infrastructure tailored to connect to other critical IT functionalities. The platform also needs high compute performance and low latencies in the stack. And it must be fully secured while abiding by regulations and staying segregated if required by the customer.
The Schuberg Philis revamped private cloud, sbp.cloud, offers a solution to handle just these kinds of huge, highly available workloads and fulfill the demands of running monolithic applications.
Automation and cost predictability
With the needs of financial institutions in mind, our engineers built sbp.cloud with interfaces to remove the tediousness of manual work. This gives customers the control to thoroughly automate their business processes and workloads. It also facilitates checks and evaluations using user-friendly dashboards that are easy to reproduce and modify. That alleviates customers from having to rely on a program such as Excel, which offers few scalability, transferability, or data-sharing options. As with all our solutions, sbp.cloud was designed with seven-layer security, which is itself subject to frequent third-party audits. This external validation of our internal control – through certifications (such as ISO 27001) and assurances (such as ISAE 340) – contributes to the reassurance that we can provide asset managers.
Although monolithic software applications have highly specific technical requirements, sbp.cloud can fully cater to them. As a private cloud, it entitles organizations to a bundle of resources , such as those that meet connectivity, latency, and IO standards. When needed, customers get a dedicated cluster in a dedicated rack with dedicated hardware that can be immediately accessed, restored, or moved. Because it provides robust stability, this service makes performance predictable. That facilitates the repeatability of organizational activities, which leads to cost predictability rather than cloud bill shock.
Compliance and digital destiny
Besides implementing best-in-breed IT standards and best industry security practices, sbp.cloud ensures that asset managers realize two of their top priorities: compliance and risk mitigation. With much auditing automated and performed in real time, our private cloud keeps financial institutions fully in control of their application landscape. Compliance thus becomes second nature. sbp.cloud is fully compliant with Dutch, EU, and US regulations, and our auditing experts track the evolving regulations that trigger the need to expand or revise cloud configurations, for example, to develop an exit strategy. Throughout our partnerships, we guide organizations to adhere to all relevant security and compliance frameworks, which also safeguards against auditing findings and mitigates risk .
Because having full digital power and operational freedom is important for organizations in regulated markets, sbp.cloud also serves as a sovereign cloud. It is 100% Dutch-hosted, and all data is stored in the datacenters of our trusted partners in the Netherlands. This makes for a secure residence for mission-critical assets, whether they comprise core applications and processes, sensitive client details, or any other workloads essential to business. Serving as a home to asset management’s mission-critical workloads, sbp.cloud thus offers the best of both worlds: soundly running applications with a 100% uptime guarantee and ensuring control over one’s own digital destiny.
Hybrid-ready for better business
As a cloud-agnostic company, we enable organizations to do better business across all IT domains, public or private. We know that the public cloud – in which an environment is shared by multiple customers – can better support certain workloads or operations, such as platform building and reporting. Meanwhile, a private cloud – dedicated to a single customer – is ideal for mission-critical assets and those needing sovereign soil. This is why our engineers made sbp.cloud fully hybrid-ready, meaning the environment can seamlessly connect workloads between our private cloud and the public clouds of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and/or Google Cloud. As a hybrid cloud, sbp.cloud ensures that all elements have interoperable connectivity, all landscapes are interconnected, and traffic between what’s private and what’s public stays smooth and safe.
Regardless of whether a private, public, or hybrid cloud setup proves most fitting for our customers, two priorities persist. That is, to guarantee that the cloud consistently generates business value and unburdens the organization of all technical worries. That way, financial institutions can focus on what most matters to them and their customers: asset management.
Want help managing your mission-critical assets? Read more content in our series about sbp.cloud or get in touch.
