Why There's More Risk for Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) Orgs Delaying the Move to Open Source and Cloud Databases

Driven by a highly competitive market, the need to modernize, to attract and retain talent, to improve time to market and to improve the developer experience are all fueling the desire to move to open source and cloud-based services in banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI). We've seen a tipping point with the usage of open source databases overtaking that of legacy proprietary vendors, yet some traditional BFSI players are still dragging their heels on adoption. Often this lack of adoption comes down to some companies just not having full visibility of how far open source databases like Postgres have come and just how enterprise-ready and secure they can be with the right implementation.

It’s clear that financial services organizations see the benefits of open source. In the 2022 State of Open Source in Financial Services survey, a full 87% of Senior IT leaders agreed that open source is valuable to the future of the financial services industry. In addition, 47% of leaders identified AI, machine learning (ML), and analytics as the most valuable technology for the future of financial services.

Moving to cloud environments is also a strategic initiative for BFSI. In a survey by American Banker and Arizent, 40% of U.S. bank executives indicated cloud is one of their top five spending priorities in 2023. And 80% of respondents said they expected to have at least 20% of their data in the cloud this year.

So why the delay in moving to open source?

There are a number of challenges and fears that hold BFSI firms back from modernizing their database systems. These include worries about the migration process, security and compliance challenges, concerns about open source databases fit-to-purpose for specific IT workloads and business-critical applications, and a hesitancy to abandon legacy technology that organizations already invested time and money into. 

The right database management system (DBMS) partner can help alleviate these concerns, by enabling BFSI firms to: 

Mitigate risk

Enterprise-grade open source database platforms can extend and enhance security to include all the features that BFSI enterprises need in a modern database management system and ensure you can confidently standardize on Postgres. Risks can be mitigated through improved management capabilities, extreme high availability, Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), and other solutions that protect data integrity.

Minimize the impact of unexpected failures

Unexpected database downtime can significantly impact a bank’s reputation, financial stability, and regulatory compliance. But a managed open source platform like Postgres can provide extreme high availability, and can also enable BFSI firms to integrate the necessary security and compliance tools to safeguard customer information.

Maintain uptime and avoid service disruptions for routine maintenance

Many organizations see planned downtime as an unavoidable necessity. After all, technology upgrades, mandatory security patching and other system hygiene tasks often require application downtime. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With a distributed version of Postgres, maintenance work can be executed against your database without application downtime or service degradation, so your database is continuously available.

Power financial innovation

Open source mandates are growing in many industries and countries to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and expertise and empower consumers with more choices and services. The EU’s European Commission has even adopted new rules for open source software distribution to enable companies and citizens to seamlessly use and further develop Commission software.

Postgres is well known for its collaborative and thriving open source community that ensures constant innovation. It also supports modernization and cloud initiatives by enabling organizations to run modern applications anywhere and everywhere, on any and every cloud. And it seamlessly integrates with a wide variety of tools to support workflow continuity. This flexibility and cohesiveness is at the very heart of modernization and digital transformation.

Reduce operating costs and TCO

Rising prices and restrictive database licensing agreements put a damper on innovation and infrastructure modernization, but open source databases offer an alternative that’s flexible, extensible, innovative and ever-evolving, at a vastly superior price point. 

Make the Postgres move with EDB

Open source PostgreSQL on its own has proven to be transformational for many financial and insurance organizations. Developers have even ranked Postgres their #1 most preferred database, as it enables them to be enormously productive and innovative. 

If fears about moving to Postgres are holding you back from experiencing the benefits, EDB is here to address your concerns and challenges. As the leading contributor to Postgres, we can help you plan your migration and control risk, manage costs, and scale efficiently. We can also help you amplify the potential of Postgres with high availability, reliability, security, 24x7 global support and advanced professional services, both on premises and in the cloud. 

Our dedicated support team is staffed full-time by PostgreSQL experts offering deep and diverse knowledge about PostgreSQL deployments, open source extensions and major cloud infrastructure platforms. Because our software engineers are actually involved in the development of the Postgres database, we can help you move to open source and the cloud with confidence.

And chances are, once you’ve moved to open source, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.

Discover how achieving database stability and resiliency is helping BFSI CIOs overcome their challenges and modernize faster.