A new report by Nutanix revealed that 43% of global financial services firms are planning to increase their private cloud investments in the following year.

The report showed that 86% of financial services stated that hybrid cloud is their ideal IT operating model, and many financial services seek to run more applications in private cloud. Indeed, the financial sector is using private cloud more than any other industry except IT, tech and telecoms.

Moreover, the financial services sector has also stated plans to reduce reliance on traditional, non-cloud-enabled data centers from 14% to 4% in one year. It was reported they planned to increase their deployment of hybrid cloud to about 54% penetration within five years.

This is mainly due to the sanitary crisis, which pushed these enterprises to increase their investment in hybrid cloud. By doing so, they are trying to gain greater control of IT resource usage and to get more speed and flexibility to meet business requirements. Besides, another key factor is cost savings.

The report also revealed hybrid cloud is the only IT model that will demonstrate positive growth among financial companies and that it is expected to increase by 39% within a five-year frame.

However, financial services organizations have shown their concerns about security, privacy, and compliance when running applications within public cloud solutions.

Yet, almost half of the financial sector respondents stated their trust in private cloud as they are either fully deploying HCI or are in the process of doing so. Indeed, HCI is said to reduce the time it takes to build the necessary software-defined, scalable infrastructure to support private cloud.

The report revealed that many financial industries needed more people with skills to manage their mixed private/public cloud environments and more expertise in cloud-native technologies and containers, including Kubernetes.