Financial services firms are rapidly adopting public cloud services because they recognize the potential for greater flexibility, scalability, cost management, and security than their existing solutions can offer. However, there can be significant limitations to cloud solutions, forcing prospective customers to make trade-offs in terms of performance, tenancy, and innovation.
One way to address these limitations is through the utilization of Bare Metal as-a-Service, Powered by Pure. It offers the best features of public cloud while delivering the enhanced capabilities and service required for financial services. For financial services firms, it’s a much-needed bridge between the reliability of legacy solutions and the promise of new technology.
What Is Bare Metal?
The term “bare metal” refers to dedicated, single-tenant infrastructure, and “bare metal as-a-service” is procured and delivered just like cloud services are. While public cloud generally offers generic access to multi-tenant servers, bare metal provides single-tenant, on-premises data center capabilities and performance in a fully automated, on-demand solution. In this way, it combines the positive attributes of data center-domiciled hardware with the flexibility, scalability, cost management, and security of the cloud.
Bare metal as-a-service is a much-needed evolution in the delivery of IT capabilities that goes beyond the standard choices offered by the public cloud. Bare metal as-a-service has applications in a number of industries, including chip development, oil and gas, and medical technology. It’s also particularly well suited to financial services.
How Bare Metal Meets the Unique Needs of Financial Services
In the past, the financial services industry was slow to join the move to the cloud due to high technical debt, performance and regulatory requirements, and industry-specific workloads. That resistance has eroded over the past several years, particularly as the pandemic ushered in a decade’s worth of change in the span of a couple of years. At the same time, new delivery alternatives such as bare metal as-a-service have arrived to provide the levels of performance and support required by financial services.
Bare metal as-a-service has a number of features that are crucial to supporting specific financial services use cases:
- The provisioning of dedicated servers and storage platforms delivers higher, more reliable performance when compared to generic, multi-tenant solutions offered by public cloud providers.
- Workloads can be moved “to the edge,” where they’re closer to important sources of data or critical components such as exchange matching engines. This can also enhance the functioning of near real-time processes such as fraud detection or trade risk management.
- Data can be stored in specific locations to meet data governance and sovereignty standards or other regulatory requirements.
- Bare metal delivers attributes of the cloud such as scalability (up and down), enhanced security, and flexibility that are a welcome change from an on-premises data center.
Further, Bare Metal as-a-Service, Powered by Pure, reduces time to value by providing organizations with the ability to deploy infrastructure at the speed of software and implement down stack automation through code. Additionally, it delivers end-to-end management capabilities, comprehensive data replication and data protection options, and one of the best AI/ML-enabled data analytics platforms on the market.
At the end of the day, bare metal as-a-service is a manifestation of the evolution of the cloud from a one-size-fits-all data store and compute engine to a nuanced and responsive offering that meets the needs of modern business. As a result, it’s particularly well suited for application in the financial services industry.
Bare Metal as-a-Service, Powered by Pure, for Financial Services
Bare metal as-a-service offers the flexibility and efficiency organizations need today. Jacob Smith, VP, Bare Metal Marketing and Strategy at Equinix, had this to say:
“It’s particularly interesting for those who are trying to win: working on projects where they need to put infrastructure globally; do it at lower cost, higher performance, or in regulated environments, or with special hardware for streaming, etc.”
Financial services firms have unique needs and requirements and Bare Metal as-a-Service, Powered by Pure, is a powerful alternative to legacy data centers and public cloud solutions. It delivers the speed needed for innovation, cost rationalization, and the integrated security of the cloud but with the performance attributes of existing hosted solutions. Plus, with Pure Storage® built in, this is the only solution where disaggregated, shared storage is embedded into a full-stack bare metal offering.
Learn more about Enhancing Financial Services with Bare Metal, or schedule a demo today. Find out how Pure Storage enterprise-class data solutions accelerate financial services.
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Learn more about Enhancing Financial Services with Bare Metal
BMaaS offers the attributes and functionality of data center-hosted servers in one comprehensive package that includes many positive attributes of a public cloud service.
