In today’s turbulent financial business world, we are facing a constantly shifting environment and it can be a battle to adopt systems and infrastructures that have a long shelf life and will enable us to quickly adapt to and respond to changes within the payments market. Due to this complex evolving market, more and more organisations are becoming aware of the cloud. Some organisations, however, are still hesitant and wonder how advantageous it would be for their business and how robust security really is.
Challenges of moving to cloud based systems
A growing number of businesses across the world have migrated safely across to the cloud yet safety concerns around how easily systems can be infiltrated are still stopping some organisations from going ahead. My advice is to keep one step ahead and start to research and investigate the options and services available. There has been much discussion around cloud migration within the payments industry and I believe deploying cloud-based systems alongside traditional methods can help propel your business into the future.
While moving to the cloud undoubtedly brings some great benefits, being aware of the challenges is also crucial to a successful migration. These challenges may include introducing new processes and procedures for staff in order to maximise the benefits of the cloud solution, as well as a cultural change. This can also prove time consuming and there will be costs involved and training. That said, the end results and benefits largely outweigh the negatives and investing time and costs into this migration could bring a more viable long-term solution that would be fluid and easy to adapt in the future as business needs change. This could ultimately save money in the long run and ensure you keep up with the competition in this rapidly evolving digital era.
Adding cloud services can also introduce a weakness to your infrastructure; therefore, organisations need to ensure they have the correct high-level security applications in place. It is vital that these solutions are kept up to date as updates are frequently released to combat the increased incidence of data breaches.
Organisations must also ensure that their employees are educated around network security practices to help avoid and minimalise these attacks. Research suggests there has been a recent rise in application layer attacks and security teams can have difficulty defending both IoT and cloud environments. IoT botnets are becoming more mature and automated and criminals frequently used cloud environments to launch more advanced distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). The biggest concerns we hear are worries about security attacks at the service provider, losing control over your organisation’s data and increased vulnerabilities over using a shared infrastructure.
Benefits of moving to cloud-based systems
At TNS, we can protect your cloud-based systems with the robust security of our Payment Application Managed Services, for users that want to enjoy the benefits and full range of functionality of our secure and resilient cloud based services but do not want the complexity of hosting and managing a payment application in-house.
Cloud based solutions like TNS’ Payment Application Managed Services are designed to be highly scalable to meet growing business needs. Extra resources can be deployed quickly, while TNS’ support teams monitor your payment environments 24 hours a day.
TNS’ Payment Application Managed Services bring flexibility in being payment application vendor neutral, with bring your own license and multi-tenant options, all of which are built to be PCI-DSS compliant and validated.
By utilising TNS’ cloud based solutions you can save on infrastructure and operational costs such as data center, network, hardware, operating systems and ancillary application software as well as staff costs. TNS is a payment specialist so we can handle the complexity of the payment application environment while your end users can remotely access the environment to perform their business as usual activities.
A report by IDC suggests spending on public cloud accounts is expected to grow at a massive six times the rate of overall IT spending from 2015 through 2020. These figures show the huge wave of companies moving across to cloud based systems and therefore, those that don’t take the plunge and embrace the cloud could be left out in the cold as their competitors lead the way. Working with a reputable payments specialist, such as TNS, ensures you don’t put sensitive data at risk.
To find out more about TNS’ Payment Application Managed Services in the cloud, visit: https://tnsi.com/product/payment-application-managed-services-in-the-cloud/
About Mark Collins
Mark Collins is Managing Director of TNS’ fintech Solutions business in Europe, which includes offices in the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy and Germany. Mark drives all sales and business activity in his region and is part of TNS’ leadership team, which is responsible for setting TNS’ strategic direction and implementing its vision.
About Transaction Network Services (TNS)
Transaction Network Services (TNS) has been a trusted provider to the payments industry for over 25 years. TNS’ broad portfolio of solutions includes secure and resilient transaction delivery services, used by many of the top banks, transaction processors and ATM deployers around the world.
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