The financial services sector has historically been viewed as a legacy industry with behemoth organizations slow to adopt change. In the face of increasing cybersecurity threats, however, banks are empowering their information technology departments to re-tool their infrastructure to ensure the latest security and compliance measures, including through the use of virtualization, according to Josh Holst (pictured, left), vice president of information systems at Hills Bank and Trust Co.

“We’re seeing a big shift in the financial services world with the fintechs [financial technology], the brick and mortar-less banking, robo-advisors, digital currencies and just an increased demand in what our customers want. So what we’re trying to do from an IT infrastructure standpoint is build that solid foundation where we can quickly adapt and move where our industry is taking us,” Horst said.

Holst and Colin Gallagher (pictured, right), senior director of VxRail product marketing at Dell EMC, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming sudio, at this week’s VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the latest trends in banking IT. (* Disclosure below.)

Increasing ownership of services for IT

The key transition for Hills Bank and Trust was migrating from a traditional rack model to VMware Inc.-based virtualization. Going to the managed service business model frees up a lot of resources that were previously tied up managing hardware infrastructure, according to Horst.

“I just want to be able to provide those services back to the bank. We have a lot of applications owned within the line of businesses; I’d like to be able to free up resources on my team to be able to bring those back into IT. Again, more for the control and the structure around it, change management, compliance, making sure we’re patching systems appropriately, things along those lines,” Holst said.

Bringing these applications back into IT control is essential for ensuring company-wide compliance with the latest security requirements, which are paramount in the banking technology space. “We’ve got an increased government regulations and compliance we have to deal with, so staying on top of that and then cybersecurity is huge in the banking field,” Holst concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Dell EMC have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE