The future of financial services in Mauritius lies in the adoption of
HCI 2.0 technology
21 October 2021
Over the years, Mauritius has positioned itself as an International Financial Centre (‘IFC’) and the preferred hub for investment into Africa, due to its enabling business environment (1st in Africa and 13th in the World as per World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Report 2020), its reliable hybrid regulatory framework, its network of Investment Promotion and Protection Agreements (‘IPPAs’) and Double-Taxation Avoidance Agreements (‘DTAAs’), among others.
The Mauritius IFC is home to one of the oldest commercial banks in the Southern Hemisphere and has a sophisticated banking system, with more than 20 banks operating on the island. The Mauritius Stock Exchange (‘SEM’) operates two markets, namely the Official Market and the Development and Enterprise Market, two platforms that are being used by both local and international companies. The various options available in Mauritius for structuring global businesses have also been of paramount importance in developing a vibrant Financial Services sector in Mauritius.
Financial and insurance activities contributed to around 12% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product in 2020 and are expected to maintain around the same level of contribution this year, according to the Financial Services Commission.
Data is the very lifeblood of the financial services sector and organisations in this segment tend to have massive amount of data on their customers in order to gain key insights to innovate and to better serve their customers. Having the right infrastructure becomes critical, with the need to ensure high efficiency and scalability in terms of data storage and high performance for superfast data analytics and insights. It is also of paramount importance and of upmost priority, on every CIO’s agenda, to protect its critical asset and to ensure that it is always available.
Catalyst enabling accelerated digitalisation
The Covid-19 pandemic is proving to be a tremendous catalyst for the country’s financial services sector, accelerating the digitalisation journeys that had already been trending, well before the start of the health crisis.
The New Normal has given rise to a drastic increase in online transactions and remote working causing not only an extension of the cloud to the edge but has also led to a significant transformation of the digital workplace. These key drivers, together with ever-increasing data storage requirements with accelerated digitalisation, are forcing the overall IT infrastructure to evolve. Hence, organisations in the financial services are turning to the next generation of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI 2.0) to bridge the gap and future-proof their IT environments.
HCI 2.0 combines the best of hyperconverged infrastructure and converged architectures, allowing for independent scaling of compute and storage nodes. The flexibility and ease of management of HCI 2.0 allows organisations not only to be more agile but to also gain in cost efficiency and performance. They can now easily cater for the rapid increase in data storage capacity, which prior to HCI 2.0 required rather expensive solutions.
Business Continuity
Data mobility is key to enabling business continuity. Of critical importance for financial services organisations is the need to ensure seamless data mobility with simple, efficient replication from on-premise infrastructure to a disaster recovery site or between hybrid /cross private cloud platforms. This means that while an organisation has all its data housed in its primary data centre, it must also be able to have its systems up and running at a secondary site in the event of a disruption, and its critical data must be instantly available at the secondary site. At the same time, it must also ensure that adequate security and risk mitigation measures are in place to be compliant with legal and regulatory requirements.
For these organisations, HCI 2.0 powered storage provides built-in backup technology, enabling data backup to be done securely and enabling superfast data restore in the disaster recovery location. This enables enterprises to recover fast and within minutes in case of ransomware attacks for instance. Furthermore, HCI 2.0 technology allows a business to greatly optimise its bandwidth usage between the production data centre and the disaster recovery data centre, leading to significant reduction in recurrent connectivity costs.
The future of banking and financial services is online, so it is imperative that industry leaders move business-critical systems and applications to flexible, intelligent, and agile environments. HCI 2.0 technology is well positioned to help CIOs modernise their IT infrastructure. It is a technology that will provide CIOs with efficient, scalable systems capable of providing non-stop availability, higher performance, and security, while also keeping overall IT costs much lower than previous hyperconverged systems.
Go for HCI 2.0 at the earliest and future-proof your IT environments.