Balancing security, sovereignty and cost with data innovation
- By CDOTrends editors
- October 15, 2026
AI adoption in financial institutions is moving from planning to implementation, making clean, governed, resilient data and outcome-based recovery readiness essential. In this fireside chat, Hitachi Vantara’s Head of BFSI Acquisition Ian Redmile sits down with CDOTrends Lachlan Colquhoun to discuss the latest data and AI trends in the banking, financial services and insurance industry. Ian offers his insights on how organisations can achieve operational resilience and innovation while also satisfying increasingly rigorous regulatory and compliance regimes.
Key takeaways:
1. Organizations are realizing value from AI, but initiatives are challenged when data is duplicated, unclean, poorly governed or unavailable.
2. Financial institutions are moving beyond blanket cloud-first strategies by matching workloads to differently configured hybrid cloud environments, AI factories, or sovereign data centers based on latency, security, performance, cost, and sustainability.
3. Technology leaders should begin with critical business services, map applications, data, infrastructure, and third parties, and prove recovery within agreed tolerance levels. Resilience should be measured by outcomes, not intentions.
4. Hitachi Data Insights helps identify siloed data, remove redundant, obsolete, or trivial data, and categorize and index information. Hitachi Vantara also offers organizations a measurable assessment to evaluate where data and applications should reside.
