Question 2 (Marks: 45) Read the following case study and then answer the questions that follow: Digital transformation is the key to survival, success and innovation in the financial sector. For companies in banking and other financial services, digital transformation can be a wide-ranging and potentially complex undertaking. Organisations not only have to transform the customer experience and modernise their business models, but they have to do that while still ensuring they can: - Meet strict and evolving regulatory guidelines, often across global markets. - Deliver superior performance, with no gaps in availability or business continuity. - Ensure world-class data privacy, data protection and cybersecurity for customers, partners and others across a broad ecosystem, including the support of evolving industry standards such as Sheltered Harbour. - Leverage modern technologies such as hybrid cloud, hyperconverged infrastructure, big data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and automated software-defined architectures to simplify IT and drive business innovation. - Empower developers with containers, Kubernetes and other modern tools to accelerate speed to market for new services and modernize the existing application portfolio with mobility and other customer-centric and cloud-native capabilities. - Financial services companies that embrace IT modernization to accelerate digital transformation can achieve a distinct competitive advantage. Financial services success stories Baillie Gifford, a financial services and asset management firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland, has a rapidly growing client base and is expanding services for global customers. With its previous IT infrastructure, there were multiple silos and compute, storage and networking were difficult to manage. Moving to hybrid cloud and a modern IT platform with Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure, the company has expanded its footprint and added new services. "Things never stand still in IT," says Colin Lennox, head of technology and service delivery at Ballie Gifford. "Hybrid cloud and modern infrastructure is very important to Baillie Gifford. It enables us to drive how we deliver services to our clients. Hyperconverged infrastructure allows us to quickly deploy those services, make changes and scale up to better meet the needs of the business. We are currently using artificial intelligence and machine learning to supplement our investment managers. We continue to innovate and will continue to innovate for the foreseeable future." Republic Bank is a Louisville-based financial institution with 52 physical locations. A key aspect of the bank's digital transformation initiative was focused on data protection and management. "Data is paramount to us," says Sean O'Mahoney, chief technology officer at Republic Bank. "We have to maintain that data for many reasons, and protection of that data is a huge responsibility that we take very seriously. There are regulatory rules that we have to follow. There are credit card industry PCl rules that we have to follow to retain and protect data, but also to manage and know where it is going and see who is seeing it and whether or not they are supposed to be seeing it." The bank modernised with Dell EMC Data Protection, leveraging tight integration with VMware for easy data management and automated backups. With Data Domain protection storage, Republic Bank has achieved a 72:1 deduplication ratio and 98.6% data reduction. Source: httosi/lwww,techtarget.com/searchvmware/voiceofthecustomer/ln-Financial-Services-ITModernization-ls-Key-to-Digital-Transformation-Success [27 January 2023]. Note: In your answers, you will be awarded more marks for integrating the theory and facts from the case study than if you discuss them separately. Q.2.1 With the use of examples applicable to the case study, explain the breaking down of data silos in information management. Q.2.2 Analyse the factors applicable to Baillie Gifford when building a cloud strategy to (10) move from the enterprise to the cloud. Q.2.3 Assess the importance of data governance with application to the case study. Q.2.4 Identify and explain technology mega-trends in the case study that are causing digital disruption in the financial sector