Cloudera On-Premises Delivers Architecture Cost Savings, Faster Time To Value, And Enhanced Security For Financial Services Organizations

Cloudera on-premises is a cloud-native data platform that can deliver greater agility, flexibility, and cost efficiency for organizations in financial services. With Cloudera, these organizations may experience cost savings in relation to their infrastructure, faster time to value for their diverse use cases, and enhanced productivity for their data teams with a secure solution.

Cloudera commissioned Forrester Consulting to interview six representatives of five organizations and conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with Cloudera on‑premises.¹ This abstract will focus on the use of Cloudera on-premises at financial services organizations and its value to these organizations. ­Among interviewees, four were in the finance sector, including:

• The CTO architect at a global financial services organization.
• The vice president of platform engineering at a global financial services organization.
• The head of data platforms at a financial services organization in APAC.
• The executive director of data at a financial services organization in APAC.

Interviewees said that prior to using Cloudera, their organizations typically used an on-prem platform with multiple data warehouses and databases. But they explained that this approach lacked flexibility and agility and that over time, it proved to be cumbersome and difficult to manage. These limitations led to growing infrastructure costs and a backlog of unexecuted use cases.

After the investment in Cloudera, the interviewees’ financial services organizations saw cost savings, revenue generation, and greater flexibility. Key results from the investment include cost savings from modern architecture, faster time to value, enhanced productivity, furthered sustainability goals, hybrid flexibility, and enhanced security.

INVESTMENT DRIVERS for FINANCIAL SERVICES Organizations

The interviewees’ organizations struggled with common challenges before adopting Cloudera on-premises, including:

• Security concerns. Given the sensitive data they held and regulations they faced, interviewees explained that security was an ever-present concern and priority for their financial services organizations. They needed to ensure that only the right users had access, data breaches were prevented, and regulatory requirements were met. The CTO architect in financial services said, “Given the proprietary nature of some of our data, it’s not easy to just go to a cloud player without a lot of our proprietary and confidential data being at risk.”
• Growing costs. Interviewees highlighted that their organizations were trying to find ways to limit growing costs that stemmed from their increasing amounts and use of data. Both storage and compute were expensive yet necessary for continued success. The head of data platforms in financial services noted that these concerns led their organization to invest in Cloudera, “What Cloudera offers, from a pricing perspective, is something that helps us to manage our costs even as we expand.”
• Limitations around data use cases. Interviewees’ organizations had backlogs of data-focused use cases that could mitigate risk, cut costs, and generate revenue, but they were stymied by siloed data, subpar functionality, and, in some cases, costly data ingest with their legacy data warehouses. This led the organizations to be too limited in the use cases they pursued and too slow to get them off the ground.

Key Results For FINANCIAL SERVICES ORGANIZATIONS

The results of the investment for the interviewees’ organizations include:

Cost savings with modern architecture. Interviewees explained that because of Cloudera, they could plan for less capacity and, ultimately, save significant infrastructure costs due to the decoupled scaling of storage and compute, the ability to more easily shift workloads, and the support of higher-density storage with Apache Ozone’s on-premises object storage. At the composite organization, Cloudera results in a 35% reduction in architecture costs.

• The CTO architect reported a significant improvement in utilization rates at their financial services organization due to Cloudera: “We definitely experience a lot more utilization of those clusters. Before, the most we could get was, like, 30% utilization. Now, we’re more at 60% to 70% utilization.”

• The executive director of data in financial services emphasized the significance of a decoupled environment and noted the increased flexibility and utilization it led to: “There’s definitely added value because the compute is segregated from storage, and both can be expanded independently. That’s how Cloudera gives you the flexibility. We continuously expand the compute. There’s definitely more utilization.”
• The same interviewee explained, “Because of Kubernetes and Cloudera, there’s definitely less capacity we need to plan.” Interviewees in the financial services industry highlighted the importance of the integration of Kubernetes with Cloudera and the ability to lower costs by moving workloads within one stack in their ecosystem to another.

• Interviewees noted that their organizations’ storage density also improved with Cloudera. One interviewee reported that their financial services organization required 23% fewer storage nodes with Cloudera, which saved significant costs and also contributed to sustainability goals. Interviewees frequently highlighted the benefit of Ozone object store in Cloudera.

Faster time to value. Interviewees said that with Cloudera, their organization could spin up and execute use cases more quickly in a centralized, cloud-native environment that provided the flexibility to scale as needed. With Cloudera, the composite organization’s use cases see time to value an average of 80% faster.

• Multiple interviewees at financial services companies said their organizations used Cloudera to quickly develop and execute dozens of use cases that delivered tens of millions of dollars in value. Interviewees said their organizations used Cloudera for use cases that were central to their long-term success as financial services organizations, including fraud detection, risk mitigation, and decision management. They described using Cloudera to ingest real-time payment data and, in turn, build models that scanned millions of financial transactions in real time.
• Interviewees also noted their financial services organizations used Cloudera for revenue generation. The executive director of data noted how their organization used Cloudera for a successful hyper-personalized campaign that relied on transaction history and delivered more than 1 million offers per day: “When a customer opens their internet banking or mobile banking, it’ll have a banner with a personalized message saying it may be a good time [to purchase a given product]. The success rate is very good.”
• Some interviewees explained that traditionally it could be difficult to use open-source components as a financial services organization, but that Cloudera made it as easy as possible. The executive director of data elaborated: “You can leverage open source, and that’s a game changer to fast track. It’s why we chose Cloudera. Yes, it’s a packaged solution, but it gives you the flexibility to deploy any type of open-source models on the platform.”

Enhanced productivity for data teams. Interviewees said their organization’s Cloudera users, including data administrators, architects, and analysts, saw time savings due to the solution’s easy-to-use interface, rolling restart, workload portability, and greater alignment due to centralized data. At the composite organization, those employees impacted see an average time savings of 20% with Cloudera.

• Interviewees discussed the value and efficiency gains that stemmed from data being centralized with Cloudera. This resulted in more reuse of data and models instead of building those assets again. Additionally, interviewees spoke of the value of Cloudera driving alignment on queries and ensuring they run in the right order.
• The VP of platform engineering in the financial sector explained: “The savings that we have with Cloudera in the orchestration of queries and for my team being able to support the cluster and keep it running are huge. That alone was a good reason to move to Cloudera rather than trying to roll out something on our own.”

Furthering sustainability goals. Cloudera enabled interviewees’ financial services organizations to rely on far less storage and computer infrastructure, which allowed them to reduce their footprint and meet sustainability objectives.

• Interviewees said investing in Cloudera helped their organizations achieve their sustainability objectives. For instance, one interviewee said that with improved storage capacity with Cloudera, their organization avoided 500 additional servers. The interviewee described Cloudera as enabling the organization to limit infrastructure growth without negatively impacting business.
• The VP of platform engineering in financial services explained, “Cloudera has an impact from a footprint perspective, a sustainability perspective, and a cost perspective.”

Enhanced security. Cloudera enhanced security at financial services organizations by helping ensure data accessibility only on a need-to-know basis and reducing the probability of a data breach. Additionally, Cloudera provided a single location for consistent data governance and lineage.

• Multiple interviewees in the financial services sector identified security as a top benefit of Cloudera. For instance, several said their organization had extremely stringent security requirements regarding external threats and which employees should be granted access and that Cloudera helped uphold those high standards.
• Interviewees also explained that Cloudera provided one location to manage data-processing and data-access workloads. This prevented overlapping policies that would become out of sync over time.

Appendix A: Endnotes