"As one of the world’s leading cloud services, disaster recovery and managed hosting providers, SunGard knows a thing or two about smart business planning. IT administrators and business leaders are faced with numerous challenges today, many of which stem from the rapid rate of change in all things related to technology. In a constantly evolving IT and corporate world, strategy and effective planning are integral to securing business continuity and success. SunGard recently performed a key study exploring how organizations with short-term approaches to risk management and business continuity could forfeit their competitive advantage.
According to the study, business decision makers and management personnel most commonly act in a reactionary way when it comes to risk and regulations. While the study focused on the financial services segment, the key takeaways can be easily extended to the broader enterprise. Even though financial services have particularly stringent regulations in place, the extent to which technology has permeated businesses has brought numerous complex regulations and compliance mandates to the enterprise’s door as well. Organizations are tasked with navigating the tricky regulatory environment, and it can be easy for these entities to fall into the trap of focusing on the short-term in efforts to get by. However, the problem with this mindset is that it eliminates opportunities for businesses to gain a competitive edge through long-term strategization.
“Turbulence in regulatory change is shaping short-term attitudes towards risk management, which could affect future profitability in the financial industry,” said Brian Traquair, president of SunGard’s capital markets business. “At a time when risk management budgets are increasing to respond to regulation, firms must begin to adopt a long-term approach to risk and compliance to help drive competitive advantage and future revenue. Those that continue to view risk management as a tick-box exercise may struggle to successfully compete in the new, regulatory-driven era of financial services.”
SunGard Emphasizes Other Key Technology Trends
In June, SunGard released another important report detailing some of the technology trends with the most impact on business evolution.
“The finance industry has undergone a transformation over the last five years imposed by the evolution of client requirements, escalating regulatory and risk demands, increased competition and budget pressures,” said Harold Finders, CEO of SunGard Financial Systems. “As financial services firms are now growing accustomed to this new normal, they are moving beyond survival mode to focus on growth and future success. These firms are re-evaluating their business models to achieve this, driving important global technology trends across financial services.”
The SunGard report highlighted how more organizations are taking advantage of managed hosting services in efforts to do more with less resources and boost overall agility. In fact, firms seek improved agility so that they are better able to deliver services to clients, boost productivity, and adopt new technologies and processes to spur innovation and identify new revenue sources. Additionally, SunGard emphasized how more businesses are focusing efforts on architecting smarter IT infrastructure that streamlines processes and workflow. With more intelligent design in place, organizations can improve the quality of data stored in their data centers or cloud environments so that better analytics can be performed to produce business intelligence with more long-term value.
In addition, SunGard reported that many firms are increasing their outsourcing of non-value-added IT functions to managed services providers so that in-house IT teams can focus efforts and resources on more business-critical tasks that drive new revenue. Looking at the financial services industry alone, SunGard reported that firms are expected to increase spending on the outsourcing of services and technology at twice the rate of increases to onsite IT spending. Outsourcing trends show that businesses most commonly acquire private cloud environments and managed services that foster improved efficiency and cut costs."
