Almost nine in ten – 88 per cent - of financial services institutions without a multi-cloud strategy are considering adopting one in the next 12 months, according to new research from Google Cloud.

However, only 17 per cent of financial services institutions currently employ multi-cloud as part of their primary computing infrastructures, according to the study.

Google Cloud, which is third in terms of enterprise cloud market share behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, surveyed 1,300 leaders from the financial services industry across the United States, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and Australia.

The vast majority of FSIs are already using cloud – 83 per cent – according to the report.

Of the organisations currently using cloud technology, the most popular architecture is hybrid cloud followed by single cloud, which are used by 38 per cent and 28 per of institutions, respectively.

Financial services institutions in North America are leading in cloud adoption according to the report.

The highest levels of cloud workload adoption were reported in North America, with 54 per cent of institutions in the US and 52 per cent of those in Canada reporting very high cloud adoption.

However, only 42 per cent of Japanese companies reported a high level of cloud adoption.

While many financial services companies have migrated substantial workloads to the cloud, the industry is far from full adoption when it comes to core, back-office workloads according to the report.

Of financial services companies currently using a majority cloud strategy in the United States, only 54 per cent of their workloads are fully deployed in the cloud.

Almost two-thirds – 74 per cent – of data and IT security workloads were deployed in the cloud, compared to 57 per cent of regulatory reporting and fraud detection and prevention workloads.

Some workloads lagged in terms of cloud implementation according to the report; only 40 percent of core underwriting activity and 48 per cent of data reconciliation workloads were deployed in the cloud.

Europe trailed behind its international counterparts when it came to cloud usage for certain core activities like underwriting, and the UK reported only 30 per cent adoption for this function according to the report.

"While many banks have already deployed hybrid cloud environments, others are still in various stages of planning and deploying," said Jerry Silva, research vice president for IDC Financial Insights. “Clearly, hybrid infrastructure is a reality, and financial institutions must focus not only on leveraging the modern infrastructure model to gain efficiencies, resilience and agility, but also on taking the necessary steps to manage such environments, including the security and compliance of cloud services.”

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