In HostingAdvice’s “We Asked An Expert” feature, Iwona Rajca, Senior Solution Architect at Protegrity, explains why banking infrastructure doesn’t follow “cloud-first” narratives. In practice, cloud migrations frequently start as cost initiatives—then slow down when security and regulatory requirements surface late in the process. Her view: banks choose hybrid by necessity, balancing resiliency, vendor risk, and strict data residency rules that ultimately determine where sensitive data can live and move.
What’s in the piece
- Security groundwork is often underestimated: Cloud plans can look “nearly done” until InfoSec can’t sign off—creating late-stage friction that stalls multimillion-dollar efforts.
- Hybrid as risk diversification: Banks hedge against vendor lock-in and outages by keeping on-prem systems alongside cloud services—even when they adopt cloud for elasticity and spikes in demand.
- Outages amplify the resiliency question: Availability failures raise a practical concern: if there are no clear gains, the risk and cost of moving critical workloads can outweigh the upside.
- Residency requirements shape architecture: Data localization and privacy obligations influence hosting strategy, data flow routing, and which workloads can migrate (or must remain local).
- Security earlier unlocks better design: Bringing security into planning from day one reduces late-stage blocks and creates an opportunity to build future resiliency by design.
Why it matters
Banks operate under tighter constraints than most industries: reliability expectations are high, the data is sensitive, and residency rules can be non-negotiable. In that reality, “cloud-first” is less a destination than a dependency choice—one that must be justified by measurable efficiency, resiliency, and compliance outcomes.
Protegrity POV
Secure adoption of cloud and AI depends on protecting sensitive data wherever it moves. When controls are built into the data layer, teams can reduce migration friction, support residency requirements, and enable compliant innovation across hybrid environments.
How Protegrity helps
- Find & classify sensitive data: Identify where regulated data lives across hybrid estates to reduce blind spots before migrations and AI initiatives.
- Protect data in place: Apply field-level protection (e.g., tokenization/encryption) to keep sensitive values safe while still usable for approved workflows.
- Support policy-driven access: Enforce least-privilege patterns across environments so security requirements are part of the design—not a late-stage gate.
- Help reduce compliance friction: Align protection and governance to residency and regulatory expectations so cross-border data movement is controlled and auditable.
Key takeaways
- Hybrid is a governance outcome: In banking, architecture follows security, resiliency, and residency constraints.
- Pull security forward: Early security involvement prevents late-stage signoff failures and supports resilient-by-design platforms.
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