Slaying the Hobgoblins of Cloud: Unlocking Orchestration

Executive Summary

If cloud computing holds the promise of limitless scalability with minimal upfront capital investment, why have capital markets institutions been slow to adopt cloud-based solutions?  Unfortunately, limitless real-time scalability is at odds with the operational realities of modern day capital market firms.  Scalability is great, but given today’s cost- conscious, heavily regulated infrastructure, few participants have the freedom or desire to grant individual users unlimited ability to plus-up capacity at a whim.

Regulations, compliance and organizational silos trump unlimited scalability.  Cloud has failed to take off at many of today’s larger financial services institutions because they are concerned that infinite scalability is a regulatory and compliance nightmare. 

Newly emerging orchestration technology will mitigate some of those concerns.  Orchestration enables automated and controlled provisioning of IT resources and IT-based services using a rules-based operating environment that models and enforces regulatory, compliance and operational mandates.  It empowers users to plus-up their resources when needed, and scale back on these same resources when the time is right.  Orchestration is slowly penetrating today’s cloud market place. Independent service vendors (ISV) and cloud providers are working together to provide innovative orchestration solutions that can deliver near real-time scalability with effective controls that coincide with today’s global operating environment.