In financial services, data is essential for storing product information, capturing customer details, processing transactions and keeping records of accounts; the relationship between products and their underlying data has always been symbiotic. A significant amount of data infrastructure is static, fragmented across data silos or based on legacy platforms. This has created an impedance mismatch between products and the underlying data.

Enterprises are quickly evolving from a posture that approached the cloud as a kind of playground to one that goes all in to achieve cloud-first, cloud-native IT. With this transition from free-for-all to mature-business-service architecture, usually involving multiple public cloud providers, comes the need to answer some thorny questions. It’s no longer sufficient to endlessly pile on additional cloud services to a growing hybrid or distributed cloud infrastructure.

The thing about data is there’s no end to how much of it you can collect and keep. Each day, if you’re like most of the global banks I work with, you’re generating oceans of the stuff. Yet the bulk of it will never be very helpful or even relevant to your day-to-day business decisions.