Introduction
Banks are huge financial institutions that are responsible for handling the money for the common mass in the entire world. This makes the Banks rely mostly on the capacity, speed, intelligence, security and accountability for the responsibility it holds. Since, the banking industry goes through almost millions of transactions every day; mainframes are required for it has a capability of handling more than 2.5 billion transactions per day (Hon & Millard, 2018). In Australian banks as well, the core business services utilize mainframes, including the cloud services along with it. The following report would thus consist of the business services that these banks in Australia offer to their customers and the security and privacy needs that the core services need. This will pave the way for ICT requirements of these banks according to their workloads. Further, the report would present the benefits of implementing cloud services within the banking sectors and the reasons why the banks mostly make use of mainframes.
Core Business Services offered by the Bank
The three different kinds of banking services that the banks in Australia offer can be classified in three different groups. This would be further described as below:
- Individual banking:this is a type of services that usually the banks in Australia offered to the different individuals for helping them in assisting the variety of services for managing finances for an individual entity (Kelly, 2014). The services include the checking of accounts for an individual, the savings account handling of an individual, management of debit and credit cards, insurance services and Wealth Management.
- Business banking:these are the types of services that the banks in Australia mostly offer to the business owners for managing their financial services would need a different approach of banking segregating between the professional and personal finances (Newcombe, 2016). These type of banking services include the following such as business loans, checking accounts, savings account, handling of debit and credit cards, merchant services like processing of credit card, reconciliation and reporting, cheque collection and management of cash for payroll services and deposit services.
- Digital banking:this is the type of banking services offered by the banks in Australia that has the ability to manage the finances of every customer online from a computer a smartphone or tablet computer. The digital banking is becoming much more important to the consumers nowadays and the services that the banks in Australia typically offer for digital banking services to the customers include mobile check deposit, online, mobile and tablet banking, alerting for transactions and other account information via text messages, producing eStatements and online bill payments.
Brief description of security and privacy needs in relation to the bank’s core business services
The banking sectors need a much more different approach of data security than other forms of industries because these organisation deals with the financial data of the common mass and biggest organisations in the entire world. Financial Institutions often have the tendency to underestimate there is magnitude that the critical data of the business old across public and private data networks (Davidson, 2015). Financial Institutions like banking services need in depth strategies and to secure any kind of breach they must use Data Encryption as the last line of Defence. Encrypting all the financial in customer information in both storage in transit, the banks can ensure customer trust in their brand and can even increase customer trust by making them understand the security measures that the bank is put in order to protect the data and finances that run within the banking process.
Requirement for ICT workload types in the Bank
In Australian banks, the core business services utilize mainframes, including the cloud services along with it (Schlagwein, Thorogood & Willcocks, 2014). Therefore, it would require batch workloads, transactional workloads and analytical workloads to work along the entire banking service sectors across the entire Australia.
Two examples of how banks use ICT batch workload type
- Typical batch workloads tend to process huge volumes of data. Therefore, the online billing systems depend upon ICT batch workload type.
- Security regulations are governed by ICT batch workload types.
Two examples of how banks use ICT transactional workload type
- Billing and order processing.
- Use of electronic commerce that reaches across partners and suppliers.
Two examples of how banks use ICT analytics workload type
- Real-time computing capability to check for the fraudulent activities using mainframes.
- Big Data analytics used to make sense of the vast amounts of data across a complex hybrid environment.
Benefits of using cloud technologies in banking sector
Banking and financial industries have been utilizing the revolutionary concept of cloud computing and it has become a widely growing phenomenon. The cloud computing systems involves several computers within an organization to be connected through a real-time communication network (Dzomira, 2015). Thus, a single program has the capability of running through several computers at the same time. It can be easily analyzed that cloud computing indeed has several benefits over the previous technologies as a result. These are described as below:
Economic benefits: Cloud computing makes the banks avoid unnecessary investments which would provide these banks focus on other important projects and business ventures.
Improved Manageability: With cloud computing into implementation, banks and large financial industries can make rapid adjustments to their resources for all the unpredictable and fluctuating business requests as well as quickly have their applications uploaded online in no time due to the vastly improved management of Cloud computing that does not require much maintenance (Newhouse, 2017).
Why major banks use mainframes
Mainframes, or the corporate slang Big Iron is the most rapid, reliable and robust processing power that most financial institutions can make use of to handle their major computing functions into action (Khan, 2016). However, there are several other reasons why mainframes are used by the banking sectors in Australia. The reasons would be identified as below:
Big data service available with mainframes: Mainframes have the capability to run the analysis for every financial transaction in real-time and this helps the banks to get a hands-on idea about the changing needs of their customers, the rapidly changing trends in the market place, and the information about the success and failures of the ventures and the initiatives that the banks had put to use for the customers (Jerjawi, 2015). This makes the banks disregard the idea of consultants from outside to perform the analytics. It is not related to the brand loyalty or adopting latest technologies just for the sake of it, but mainframes in today’s time with added advantages of Big Data serve the banking sectors with all sorts of benefits that it could ask for.
Security, risk identification and fraud detection: Banking sectors are required not just to provide the customers with a framework and business process that would be effective for the financial transactions; but it would also require a safe and secured service since it deals with public money. The rapid analysis of the information generated from the mainframes provides the banking transactions to be crunched in the fastest way possible (Bouma, Jeucken & Klinkers, 2017). This enables the business process to catch all kinds of banking frauds in the system which mostly occurs due to the delays in processing. Mainframes have the ability to scan for any noticed discrepancy within seconds so that banks can effectively catch and prevent frauds.
Conclusion
Therefore, it can be concluded from the above report that the latest business processes that the financial institutions like banking organizations in Australia utilizes, like the mainframes amalgamated with cloud services provide maximum benefits to the entire business process. All these systems provide huge advantages to the banking sectors by providing the state of the art and superfast solutions for the business processes. These are identified with the above report consisting of the business services that these banks in Australia offer to their customers and the security and privacy needs that the core services necessitate. This paves the way for ICT requirements of these banks according to their workloads. Further, the report presented the benefits of implementing cloud services within the banking sectors and the reasons why the banks mostly make use of mainframes. The entire report helps to analyze how the mainframes and ICT services provide heap of benefits to the banking sectors.
References
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