AWS vs Azure: Which One to Choose For Banking Software Development

Mahipal Nehra July 1, 2021

The financial service industry is among the most data-intensive and highly regulated sectors around the global market. With the entrants of new technologies in the last decade, it has been vastly disrupted as well. For different financial organizations like banking, payments, insurance, and capital markets, moving ahead with digitization has become essential to remain competitive. Due to which some of the largest financial sectors have moved to the cloud, including Lloyds, Bank of America, and Westpac.

And to help financial institutions achieve their goals, both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure has come up with their financial services to provide huge relief. However, it can be a lot to choose the one among the best cloud service providers out there. So, without any further delay or introduction, it is time for me to finally assist you in understanding their basic concepts, differences, and features which will make it easier to opt for the ideal cloud infrastructure for your banking software.

AWS Financial Services

AWS is the most extensive and widely embraced cloud platform. Over the last couple of year, AWS or Amazon Web Services have moved to play a more important role in the financial services industry. It offers a secured, reliable, resilient global cloud infrastructure and services to financial institutions entailing capital markets, banking, insurance, and payments so that they can stand out from others and adapt according to digitization.

Financial Services that are build using AWS are Capital One, Allianz, Aon, Finra, Guardian, State Street and Coinbase.

Why AWS?

Fintech startups have the advantage of building on cutting-edge technologies such as cloud, blockchain, web, and mobile. Due to its low CAPEX cost, it has become a source of interest for financial institutions. But before choosing, it is important to know the capabilities and advantage it can offer your software.

#1 Seamless and Safe Data Backups for Transactions

Banking or any other financial institutions are all about transactions. The transactional database must be stored in such a way that it can provide disaster recovery regulations at different zones. Not only that, but the recovery of the data has to be accomplished in a short period of time without any disturbance. With AWS Disaster Recovery Policies, it can be achieved gracefully.

High security and fault-tolerant backups and DR are some of the major use cases for the AWS cloud platform. And if you are a fintech company, you will not have to worry about long cycles of data centres for backup.

#2 Scaling and Performance

Most Fintech companies are consumer-facing, that is, they are fully aware of the ups and downs that can be faced in the application usage pattern. But with AWS’ auto-scaling feature that ensures consistent performance during high resource consumption, the problem in usage pattern can be easily solved. AWS automatically increase the number of instances during spikes and reduces capacity during respite to reduce costs.

#3 One-Click Regulation & Compliance

Security is the highest priority in the AWS Cloud. The users of AWS can take advantage of the data centre and network architecture designed to meet the needs of security-sensitive organizations. It helps the users to understand the strong controls in place.

With AWS formation tools, the security architecture can be deployed with just a click. Although the security of the infrastructure will be managed by AWS, app security will be the responsibility of the developers.

Apart from the security, AWS cloud compliance can help in creating virtual banking platforms in the payment card industry and data security standard compliance. It also automates the processes that used to take months to complete and enables you to focus on core banking responsibilities rather than managing IT infrastructure.

#4 24×7 Availability

For every Fintech company, it is essential to be available 24×7 to ensure user’s accessibility to the services anytime, anywhere. The auto-scaling of AWS EC2 help Fintechs to maintain the availability of the application according to the usage.

Microsoft Azure Financial Services

Microsoft cloud for financial services combines the capabilities of multilayered security and comprehensive compliance coverage to provide a unique customer experience, enhance collaboration & productivity, modernize core systems and manage risks. It is committed to helping all financial institutions drive sustainable growth and provides an analytics platform that is specifically designed for the financial services sector. It has been designed for most complex frameworks and regulatory needs. By applying Artificial Intelligence, Azure can turn insights into actions and help in making better decisions.

Some of the organizations using Azure for financial services are AXA, Manulife, ABN-AMRO, Franklin Templeton and Fannie Mae.

Why Azure?

Microsoft Azure unlocks unprecedented opportunities and values. It is a robust partner ecosystem that extends the value of the platform with its additional solutions to address the immediate challenges faced by the financial industry. So, let’s take a look at the capabilities and advantages it has to offer.

#1 Onboarding, Service & Support

Microsoft Azure enables financial institutions to create an enhanced customer experience like Customer onboarding, banking customer engagement, loan management and further assistance. It helps customers to easily access the loan apps and self-service tools smoothening the loan process to provide better customer experience and loyalty while simultaneously increasing employee and organizational productivity.

Moreover, it personalizes every customer interaction with in-depth insights on the customer to engage with them on their preferred channel and manage service journey across channels through sentiment analysis to decrease resolution time. Besides customers, it enables automation and collaboration across the front & back office to improve business processes and minimizing errors.

#2 Customer Acquisition & Engagement

With the exponential growth of data in the financial sector, an organization can unify the data and use it to build a comprehensive view of the customer. Microsoft Azure helps in using that data to reach deep insights for creating better personalization actions to resonate with customers.

It allows a company to strengthen its virtual connections with both customers and employees to build upsell opportunities and attract new customers at the same time meeting regulatory necessities.

#3 Risk Management

The nature of fraud and monetary crime is ever-increasing which makes it important to identify outliers to protect financial organizations and their customers. That’s why Microsoft Azure helps in defending fraud with adaptive AI technology that can learn to improve fraud patterns. Additionally, it allows to benefit of scalable analytics and compute empower insights, reporting and modeling.

#4 Enterprise Operations

Last but not least, Microsoft Azure can help in modernizing older core systems to operate in a more data-driven, agile way. And help APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to support new models like open bank and meet impeccable regular demands.

AWS or Azure – What To Prefer?

Needless to say, both AWS and Azure is there to help financial institutions to stay ahead of their competitors while providing enhanced security, better customer engagement and outstanding performance. And now that you have a clear understanding of what each of them can help your financial institution with, it will be easier for you to opt for the one that suits your business the most. So, if you want to develop a web application, software or mobile application to meet your needs, you should get in touch with the experienced development team that can help you out with it. If you still have any questions regarding either of these two cloud technologies, do not hesitate to drop a comment.

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