Dive Brief:

• More than one-third of enterprises are expected to store more than half of their transactional systems records on the cloud by 2020, a faster migration than initially expected, according to Gartner's latest survey of senior financial executives. Approximately 93% of enterprises expect half of enterprise transactions in the future will use the cloud.

• The consistent rise year-over-year in cloud momentum extends across financial business applications as executives prioritize business analytics and enterprise applications, according to the survey. Around 40% of small, midsize and large enterprises plan to migrate to the cloud within the next three years.

• Many organizations are making the move from on-premise data to the cloud in order to reduce the effort required for on-prem upgrades and offer end users more control, said John Van Decker, Gartner's research VP.

Dive Insight:

More than half of enterprises in the cloud use multiple cloud platforms. Traditional cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft continue to dominate, but enterprise use of open-source option OpenStack demonstrates niche alternatives persist.

Google and Microsoft recently bolstered security applications on their own cloud platforms, offering customers improved data protection and third-party access regulation. Improved security measures are certainly one enticing attribute for enterprise financial systems, but cloud offerings hold more potential.

The wide array of services available on public cloud platforms opens up Big Data, machine learning and other SaaS applications to enterprises. Data can be stored, crunched and analyzed, freeing up enterprises’ in-house resources for other tasks.

The migration to the cloud extends across industries, but resistance still remains. Nearly 60% companies as of yet have no intention of discontinuing mainframe use in the near future.