Banking IT departments and CIOs are increasingly prioritizing cloud deployments as part of the overall digital transformation within the banking and financial service sector. There is an increasing demand for solutions that facilitate new and agile business models to boost employee productivity, enhance customer experiences, enable faster decision management capabilities through advanced analytics, and generally enhance efficiency across the organization. Cloud infrastructure is key to enabling these and many more technology initiatives.

Prior to 2020, the industry had been moving to public cloud as a viable deployment model as the percentage of IT investment in cloud (public and private) increased more than 53% between 2018 and 2020, outpacing investment in noncloud technology by sixfold. Response to the pandemic in 2020 served as a catalyst to accelerate investment in cloud. Cloud (public and private) spending is estimated to grow 10.9% over the next three years, nearly double the rate of overall IT spend for global banking (IDC Perspective: Banking on Cloud: Results from the 2020 CloudPath Survey, November 2020.) However, public cloud spending is expected to grow at 20.7% over the next five years, according to IDC's Worldwide 3rd Platform Spending Guide from October 2020.