Bright Lights, Where Are You?

Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. I learned this US Marine Corps slogan from our editor-in-chief Anthony Malakian who spoke about it during a recent Waters Wavelength Podcast. (PS: I’m the host!)

I am generally a positive person who sees the brighter side of dark situations, but lately, I find myself feeling more melancholic. I’m away from my family in Malaysia, and the coronavirus pandemic inundates the news and my social media feeds. 

I know better than to let my worries get the best of me though. I choose to believe that this trying time presents an opportunity to self-reflect, evaluate, discover, and shine. So, I’m improvising, adapting, and—hopefully soon—overcoming. As it turns out, all it takes is a good weekend chatting with family and good friends, some hard sessions at the gym—which is now the hallway in my tiny apartment in Hong Kong—my trusty Nespresso coffee machine, and an awesome music playlist to help me in this endeavor.

I’m not saying we should ignore what’s happening in the world. Instead, I’m advocating for a chin-up mentality. These lockdowns and restrictions can seem like a punishment, but they’re a necessity and provide an opportunity to better ourselves.

Cloud Gazing

This doesn’t apply only to humans. Companies around the globe are coming to this realization, as well.

Few could have imagined a world where more than 90% (if not more) of the workforce was either working from home, furloughed, or laid off.  

But this is becoming the new reality, which is significantly impacting the global economy and financial institutions. In a recent report, consultancy firm Quinlan & Associates estimates global GDP to contract by 4% from 2020 to 2021, or roughly $3.5 trillion. In a worst-case scenario, the firm estimates -15% GDP growth over the next 24 months. 

Covid-19 is fundamentally reshaping the way we as humans interact, and also how business is conducted on a global scale. Some firms are realizing their business continuity plans (BCP) are inadequate. Mandated work-from-home arrangements have also led firms to rethink their approach to technology. 

One such area is cloud acceptance. The cloud has been gaining wider acceptance in the institutional finance sector—if you’ve been a regular reader of this publication, you have seen many stories on the subject. However, some are still reluctant to put critical workloads and data on the cloud, for security and privacy reasons. 

In episode 188 of the Wavelength Podcast, I spoke with Mazy Dar, CEO and co-founder of OpenFin, who pointed out that it has been challenging for many firms who primarily rely on on-premise infrastructure. 

“I think this is a real wake-up call for our industry. We’ve largely stuck to an on-premise approach for anything that is confidential—customer data, and we’ve done that in the name of security and data privacy, which is obviously incredibly important. But, you realize that at a time like this, that approach becomes incredibly problematic and is now contributing to a huge hit in productivity and, quite frankly, the scale, resiliency, and agility that the cloud offers particularly in this environment is something that we should all be benefiting from,” he said.

Dar believes the industry needs to embrace the cloud more proactively and overcome concerns about security and regulatory compliance—but he stresses this doesn’t mean compromising on them. “It simply means taking advantage of the tools available in the cloud from the major cloud providers and doing that while aggressively moving infrastructure to the cloud,” he said. 

It will be interesting to see how firms shift their tech priorities during this pandemic, and what new technologies and processes they invest in.  

If there is a key takeaway from all of this, it’s this: Whether you’re thinking from an individual perspective or as a firm, everyone should use this time to evaluate areas in our lives and companies that we need to work on—Improvise and Adapt. If we do that, we will Overcome.