Anaplan for Banking Cloud Spend - Reduce Cost, Mitigate Risk and Promote Collaboration

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In today’s digital economy, banks have had to undergo digital transformations quickly to keep up with the current customer demands. With quick change often comes challenges and opportunities. At Accelytics, we’re seeing many banks needing to overcome the challenges of their cloud spend, including usage, high costs, vendor contracts, and compliance needs.

In this article, we will dive into the common challenges banks are facing with their cloud spend and how Anaplan can be utilized to reduce cost, mitigate risk, and promote collaboration across the organization.

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Defining Cloud Spend

Cloud spend refers to the costs associated with using cloud computing services and networks. Cloud computing services provide on-demand access to computing resources, such as processing power, storage, and software applications over the internet. Cloud spend includes the cost of renting these resources from a cloud service provider, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Cloud spend can include different types of charges, such as subscription fees, usage-based fees, and one-time fees for specific services. Keeping track of all the programs and fees can often be challenging. Managing cloud spend effectively is critical to ensuring that organizations can take advantage of the scalability and flexibility benefits of cloud computing while keeping costs under control.

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5 Challenges of Managing Cloud Spend at Banks

1. Cost Management: One of the biggest challenges of cloud computing is managing costs effectively. Banks need to monitor their cloud spend closely and optimize their usage to avoid overspending on resources that are not being fully utilized.

For example, suppose a bank is using a cloud provider to host its online banking platform. If the bank has a spike in traffic due to a marketing campaign for online banking, it may need to scale up its resources temporarily. However, if it forgets to scale down after the campaign is over, it could end up paying for idle resources.

2. Security and Compliance: Banks must ensure that their cloud solutions comply with strict security and compliance standards to protect sensitive customer data. Ensuring proper access controls, data encryption, and data backup are critical considerations.

If a bank uses a cloud provider to store customer data, it needs to ensure that the provider is compliant with industry regulations and that its data is secure. If a security breach occurs, the bank could be liable for penalties and damage to its reputation.

3. Vendor Management & Lock-Ins: Banks can either have multiple vendors, which can be hard to track, or rely on one vendor, which could lead to other issues. Banks may face the risk of vendor lock-in when they rely on a single cloud provider for their infrastructure needs. This could lead to a loss of flexibility and negotiating power if they want to switch providers or add new services. If a bank relies on a single cloud provider, it may be limited in its ability to switch providers or add new services.

For example, if the bank's cloud provider raises prices or experiences significant downtime, the bank may not have many alternatives. The bank may also find it challenging to move data and applications to a different provider.

4. Integration Challenges: Banks may have difficulty integrating their legacy systems and applications with cloud-based services. This can result in issues with data consistency, integration costs, and management complexity. If a bank wants to move its legacy systems to the cloud, it may face challenges in integrating those systems with cloud-based services.

Let’s say the bank's legacy systems use a different programming language than the cloud-based services. It may need to hire specialized developers to make the necessary changes.

5. Governance and Accountability: Banks need to ensure they have proper governance structures and processes in place to manage cloud usage effectively. They also need to have clear accountability for cloud-related decisions and ensure proper oversight of third-party service providers.

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Accelytics & Anaplan

Accelytics has been helping banks with their cloud spend through the Anaplan planning solution platform. Our approach is centered around determining spend, gathering insights from their current cloud setup, finding actionable cost savings and opportunities, and then tracking the performance. Here’s how we can utilize Anaplan to identify opportunities and reduce cloud spend costs.

1. Resource Allocation & Monitoring: Anaplan can help banks manage their cloud resources more efficiently by providing visibility into their usage patterns. KPIs and usage metrics can be easily tracked in one dashboard. With this information, banks can make informed decisions about how to allocate resources and optimize their usage to avoid overspending, as well as planning for future usage needs.

2. Financial Planning: Anaplan can help banks forecast their cloud spend more accurately by modeling various scenarios and predicting future usage patterns. The data updates in real time, and can be connected with other departments, such as marketing. This can help banks plan their budgets more effectively and avoid unexpected costs.

3. Vendor Management: Anaplan can help banks manage their relationships with cloud providers more effectively by tracking their performance against SLAs and monitoring their compliance with security and compliance standards. This can help banks ensure they are getting value for their money and minimize the risk of security breaches.

4. Integration with Other Systems: Anaplan can integrate with other systems that banks use, such as ERP systems, to provide a holistic view of their financial performance. This can help banks identify areas where they can optimize their usage and control costs more effectively throughout a variety of systems.

5. Collaboration and Accountability: Anaplan provides a centralized platform for collaboration among different teams within a bank. Security and user access can be granted to certain models to ensure protected access to things like customer data, encryption and contract data. This ensures that data is being handled properly, and that there is clear accountability for cloud-related decisions and that proper oversight is maintained. By collaborating cross-functionally across a bank, it can align teams to work towards the same goals, and that decisions related to cloud spend are made collaboratively and with full transparency across the organization. Using Anaplan throughout business departments can drive efficiencies, productivity, and inform teams of usage, spend and issues in real-time.

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With the importance of compliance, personal information processing, and system monitoring, cloud spend, and cloud activities should be a critical business focus. Anaplan allows banks to gain a deeper look into their cloud activities, contracts, integrations, usage, and collaboration across systems. This ultimately can lead to lower cloud spend, as well as, managed risk, and accountable data governance.

Anaplan is a diverse platform and can be used for a variety of use cases for the banking industry. Cloud spend can just be a small piece of a greater project to connect teams, host data for one source of truth and improve accuracy in everyday data processing and reporting.

If you want to learn more about our cloud spend capabilities or bank use cases in general, reach out to our experts at solutions@accelytics.com.

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