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What is Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services?

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Cloud innovation and Generative AI are rapidly changing the financial services landscape, enabling a transformation of the customer experience, empowering employees, managing risk and compliance, modernizing the core, and creating a sustainable future.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services offers a trusted financial services platform that helps harness the innovation and cybersecurity benefits of the cloud while meeting stringent internal and external compliance requirements.

Financial services organizations can accelerate their journey to the cloud, and as a result, unlock business value and improve risk management. The organizations can achieve their goals by using fit-for-purpose cloud platform investments, compliance and transparency capabilities, guidance with off-the-shelf accelerators, a cloud scale data and AI platform, and a broadly aligned partner ecosystem.

A high-level overview diagram of Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

The following sections provide more information about the various aspects of Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services:

Microsoft Cloud infrastructure

The foundation of Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services is the hyperscale public cloud providing a comprehensive and secure cloud platform that prioritizes your trust. Our cloud services are built on several key principles:

  • Security: Microsoft offers multi-layered security across physical data centers, infrastructure, and operations. With an investment of over 1 billion USD in security research and development, Microsoft actively monitors and protects business assets and data. For more information, you can read the Azure security documentation.

  • Privacy: Our core privacy principle is that you own your data. We never use it for marketing or advertising purposes. For more information, see Microsoft Privacy.

  • Compliance: Azure provides the most extensive compliance coverage among cloud service providers, with over 100 compliance offerings. This proactive approach helps safeguard data and streamline compliance for enterprises, governments, and startups. For more information, see Azure compliance offerings.

  • Reliability: Azure includes built-in reliability services that you can use and manage based on your business needs. Azure provides solutions that improve reliability in various situations such as a single hardware node failure, a rack-level failure, a data center outage, or a large-scale regional outage. For more information, see Azure reliability documentation.

  • Scale: Design apps dynamically allocate and deallocate resources to satisfy performance requirements and minimize costs. You can take advantage of Azure Monitor autoscale and the built-in autoscaling that many Azure components offer. For more information, see Azure Monitor autoscale.

Additionally, continued investments around advanced encryption controls such as confidential computing and Managed Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) are available for the most sensitive workloads.

Compliance and transparency

Financial Services organizations require confidence in the security and privacy of their data and the ability to keep innovating while protecting that data. They must also be able to meet their legislative or regulatory obligations and have more insights into the cloud operator's activities.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services builds on top of the compliance and transparency capabilities that Microsoft already provides. This capability ensures local compliance with tools and automation to speed your time to value, monitor cloud and data estate, and built-in policy content for 100+ global markets.

For more information, see Microsoft Compliance.

Compliance program for Microsoft Cloud

Compliance Program for Microsoft Cloud is a fee-based premium program offering personalized support to address compliance challenges, and educational and networking opportunities. For more information, see Compliance Program for Microsoft Cloud.

Audit transparency

We're transparent about the specific policies, operational practices, and technologies that help ensure the security, compliance, and privacy of your data across Microsoft services through our Trust Portal.

Transparency logs

Transparency logs provide details of when Microsoft engineers access your resources, to assist with regulatory requirements. The logs help answer questions like, Which subscriptions were accessed, when did access occur, and on what Azure service? For more information, see Transparency logs.

Control mappings

Regulatory Compliance in Azure Policy provides built-in initiative definitions to view a list of the controls and compliance domains based on responsibility (Customer, Microsoft, Shared). For Microsoft-responsible controls, we provide more details of our audit results based on third-party attestation and our implementation details to achieve that compliance. For more information, see Azure Policy Samples.

Compliance tools

Microsoft offers a broad range of compliance tools and overviews. For more information, read this blog post: Discover 3 ways to take a holistic approach to data protection.

Microsoft Purview

Microsoft Purview risk and compliance solutions that help you manage and monitor your data, protect information, minimize compliance risks, and meet regulatory requirements. For more information, see Microsoft Purview.

Programmatic compliance

Programmatic compliance delivers unified, machine-readable, and retrievable compliance data. For more information, see microsoft/ProgrammaticCompliance (github.com).

Industry guidance and accelerators

You can learn from reference architectures of modern financial workloads, applying tooling and templates to accelerate your next projects.

Landing zones

An Azure landing zone is an environment that follows key design principles across eight design areas. These design principles accommodate all application portfolios and enable application migration, modernization, and innovation at scale. An Azure landing zone uses subscriptions to isolate and scale application resources and platform resources. Subscriptions for application resources are called application landing zones, and subscriptions for platform resources are called platform landing zones. For more information, see Azure landing zone.

Some of the variants we recommend for financial services workloads are as follows:

Policy initiatives

Microsoft invests in a wide range of policy initiatives geared towards the financial services industry. For more information, see Azure Policy Samples.

Modernization guides

Microsoft relies on the Cloud Adoption Framework to guide cloud modernization best practices. For more information, go through the following information resources:

Reference architectures

You can find architecture diagrams and technology descriptions for reference architectures, real world examples of cloud architectures, and solution ideas for common workloads on Azure. For more information, see Azure Architecture Center

Case studies

You can find examples of how Microsoft customers in the financial domain transform customer experience, build trust, and optimize risk management here: Microsoft Customer Stories. You can filter the customer stories by criteria such as Industry, Language, Product, Organization Site, and Region.

Industry apps and templates

Industry apps and template investments are focused on showing industry-specific capabilities built on the Microsoft Cloud platform. These apps and templates include financial services templates in Microsoft 365, Frontline worker solutions, and AI capabilities tailored to financial services industry content. For more information on AI models for financial services document types, see the following information resources:

Data and AI platforms

Microsoft offers a wide range of tools to help build copilots and generative AI solutions:

  • Microsoft Copilot Studio is a graphical low-code tool for creating and maintaining copilots. For more information, see Microsoft Copilot Studio overview.
  • Azure AI Studio is a developer platform that empowers developers to rapidly develop AI solutions in a safe, secure, and responsible way. For more information, see Azure AI Studio.