As the finance sector confronts complex regulatory environments and an unpredictable global landscape, it’s vital for these businesses to have agile and scalable systems.
Yet many organizations are lagging. Nearly half (46%) of respondents to Foundry’s 2025 Cloud Computing Study cited costs and budgets as the reason cloud adoption stalled. Of those people, nearly half (49%) had concerns about managing cloud costs long-term.1
Yet these challenges must be overcome if businesses are to deliver digitally driven growth.
Dennis Joosten, Senior Director, Banking Practice at EPAM, sees unpredictable costs and risk concentration as key concerns.
Where the costs of on-premises infrastructure are predictable, cloud costs fluctuate dynamically from month to month.
New regulations like the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) only add to the challenge, as firms provision additional services to disaster-proof their critical workloads.
Moreover, cost models can promote high, long-term commitments. Foundry research shows unpredictable costs are a challenge for around a third of IT decision-makers (34%).2
“We have already seen banks that are now five or six years in the cloud facing renewals of negotiations and a doubling of the price. This is a wake-up call: banks must treat cloud as a strategic discipline to build resilience and enable new services,” Joosten explains.
Paul Nau, VP Advisory and Strategy at EPAM, concurs, noting that moving workloads is rarely a one-to-one deal, and that governance and compliance can lag behind by years.
“You don’t have good day-to-day operations to control those costs,” he says. “You have to put in a governance model. You have to put in an operating model. These things obviously take time.”
Cloud’s flexibility can itself be a double-edged sword. As Joosten notes, when infrastructure is available with a swipe of the corporate credit card, costs can spiral.
“Everything is more open and there are endless possibilities,” he says. “You need to change the mindset in your organization to have controls in place.”
Nico Zeissig, Head of Cloud DACH for EPAM, believes this is crucial.
“Cloud is always more expensive than a datacenter, full stop, if you maintain it or run it like a datacenter.” he says. “Cloud only becomes effective if that goes hand in hand with a proper migration, a proper team setup, a change of mindset and a change of organization.”
This means treating cloud not so much as an infrastructure, but more as a strategic coordinating layer, with visibility and tracking of cloud costs and how these relate to measurable business impact. What’s more, all this must be communicated throughout the organization.
The benefits remain substantial. Cloud accelerates time to market for new services and supports the sector’s hunger for consolidation.
It drives innovation and allows IT teams to switch from legacy operating models to those that support real-time intelligence and distributed customer interactions, driven by AI. And that is likely to be the template for business models which thrive in the digitized economy.
“Moving to cloud is not a question, anymore” says Nau. “It’s a given if you want to leverage this technology.”
Yet achieving this isn’t straightforward. Here, Zeissig suggests working with an experienced partner.
He says: “We (EPAM) not only bring you the technical people to get this done, but also a ready-to-use operating model. We can help you get there by augmenting your own teams in a way that they are learning on the job.”
Nau, meanwhile, recommends a targeted approach, focusing on the 10% of applications that differentiate and drive maximum business value.
“That’s where we thrive,” he adds “in coming in and trying to solve the complex problems for enterprises and working with them over a long duration.”
It’s clear that financial services businesses will need the cloud to achieve digital ambitions that are frankly non-negotiable in a changing world.
Find out more about how EPAM supports the financial services sector.
1 Foundry, Cloud Computing Study 2025
2 Ibid