In recent years, traditional financial services companies have increasingly come under attack from fast-moving financial technology firms—or “fintechs”—which use software to erode the market share of their competition.

When I first got involved in the cloud space back in 2015 the first thing I was tasked with was talking to our engineers, learning about networking, IT and general DevOps concepts. This allowed me to better understand the cloud, conduct research and provide solutions to our customers and partners.

As usage-based pricing models have continued to increase over the past decade, particularly for technology companies, there has been a major shift in budget planning and resource allocation. Since CFOs can no longer predict or approve each and every expense before they’re incurred, variations in usage costs can often make or break a company’s profitability. For example, two of the most common usage-based costs come from online advertising and IT-related cloud costs.

The financial services industry has built in more capital buffers to prevent market shocks from bringing another economic collapse. In addition to these financial controls, many banks and personal trading platforms have begun building resiliency into information technology shocks. Despite these new precautions, we’re still seeing outages today, preventing customers from depositing and withdrawing their money, completing transactions, and executing trades during key events.

It’s 2020 and running infrastructure on the cloud has become quite standard for many companies. This is underscored by a Canalys report that shows 2019 global cloud spend at $107 billion. This spend on cloud services is spread across AWS with 32.4% of the market, Azure at 17.6%, Google Cloud at 6%, Alibaba Cloud at 5.4%, and other smaller cloud players with a combined 38.5% of market share.