Discover The Benefits Of Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) for Financial Services
Tag: Microsoft
Publish Date
23/10/2024
Categories
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Empowering Secure, Scalable &
Cost-Effective Remote Work
The financial services industry is rapidly transforming, driven by the need for modernization, improved security, and the ability to meet evolving customer demands. Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is at the forefront of this transformation, offering financial institutions a powerful platform to spearhead innovation while addressing critical industry needs, including regulatory compliance, risk management, and secure remote access.
AVD is changing the way financial institutions operate, providing a secure, scalable, and cost-effective platform that enables innovation while managing risks and staying compliant with industry regulations. From enabling secure remote work to modernizing core infrastructure, AVD offers the financial services industry the tools it needs to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. Here we outline the benefits AVD can bring to the sector, including cost savings, and detail how one industry major reaped them.
Enabling Secure Remote Work
One of the most significant challenges facing financial services is enabling large-scale remote work without compromising security or compliance. Azure Virtual Desktop allows financial institutions to quickly deploy secure virtual desktops, providing employees, traders, and banking partners with safe access to critical applications and data from anywhere, on any device.
AVD offers the only multi-session Windows 10/11 experience, allowing multiple users to work on a single virtual machine, significantly reducing costs. The platform also ensures a low-latency connection, essential for high-frequency trading, while providing virtual high-powered computing desktops to support complex app development.
Improved Risk Management & Compliance
Financial services are highly regulated, and ensuring compliance across regions is critical. AVD offers robust features that improve risk management and compliance with strict industry regulations, such as PCI, SOX, and SOC 1 and SOC 2 certifications. Financial institutions can control and customize virtual machine configurations, ensuring secure access to data across borders and complying with region-specific regulations.
Additionally, AVD provides advanced security services, including isolated user sessions, reduced attack surfaces, and granular access controls to protect sensitive financial data. Features like device redirection control and disabling clipboard and screen capture further protect information.
Optimize work load efficiency
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Modernizing Core Banking & Payment Infrastructure
Banking and financial services’ legacy systems often hinder the ability to roll out new products and services. AVD helps modernize core banking and payment infrastructures, allowing providers to migrate legacy applications to the cloud and increase their agility.
Azure enables financial services to scale their computing power as needed, ensuring that storage and resources are available without delay. Whether dealing with payment processing, capital markets, or data analytics, AVD helps streamline operations by allowing institutions to scale up or down effortlessly.
Migrating data and applications to Azure enables faster rollout of banking and payment services, meeting customer demands while avoiding prohibitive hardware refresh costs.
Cost-Effective Solutions
AVD delivers a cost-effective solution tailored for financial services. With pay-as-you-go pricing, financial institutions can optimize costs by eliminating the need for extensive hardware procurement and infrastructure investment. Financial services benefit from up to 72% savings through Windows 10/11 multi-session capabilities, which allows multiple users to work on a single virtual image.
Institutions can also minimize costs by avoiding lengthy hardware procurement and leveraging flexible, scalable virtual environments that don’t require multiple licensing costs.
Success Story: FIS Transformation
Financial services giant (Fidelity Information Services) FIS has embraced AVD to modernize its infrastructure and reduce costs. By leveraging AVD, FIS has streamlined onboarding and security processes, reduced hardware and infrastructure expenses, and improved overall efficiency. FIS can now onboard employees, traders, and contractors quickly without the need for in-person office visits, laptops, or desktops while temporary staff can access all they need on their own devices with access securely managed through Azure.
Additionally, a centralized administration team monitors and audits access to virtual resources, simplifying security and compliance management while ensuring sensitive data remains protected.
AVD – You Can Bank On It!
Ready to learn more and explore how Azure Virtual Desktop can empower your organization to thrive in the digital age? Contact us at sales.uae@cobweb.com or call +971 4 455 3100.