Financial services are in the crosshairs of disruption. As AI accelerates, fraud tactics grow more sophisticated, regulatory expectations become stricter, and customers demand real-time, secure, and personalized experiences. Yet, at the heart of these industry shifts lies a critical infrastructure challenge: traditional enterprise storage is failing to keep up.
In the fight against financial fraud, time and insight are everything. Modern fraud detection relies on the ability to ingest, analyze, and act on massive volumes of streaming data. It requires AI-enabled tools that can detect subtle anomalies in real time while ensuring data integrity and compliance. Traditional storage systems, siloed, rigid, and complex, simply weren’t designed for this.
According to Gartner® 2025 research report, Stop Buying Storage, Embrace Platforms Instead, “By 2028, use of storage as a service (STaaS), consumption-based services will replace over 50% of traditional on-premises IT capacity management, budgeting, sourcing and fulfillment activities, up from less than 15% in 2023.” The report highlights that traditional approaches to storage acquisition and management are now seen as a bottleneck to modernization. Gartner notes that “over 50% of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders will replace storage appliances with solutions aligned with the principles of enterprise storage platforms.”. The report explicitly calls for the adoption of platform-native services that unify compute, storage, and network under a single, intelligent fabric. For banks, insurance firms, and financial institutions, this is a roadmap to faster, smarter, and more secure operations.
Security and efficiency also go hand-in-hand. In a regulated industry like finance, data must be both accessible and protected. Built-in multi-tenancy, encryption, snapshotting, and data erasure coding ensure that even the most sensitive financial workloads can run securely at scale, on any infrastructure. This allows teams to work with confidence, knowing that their risk models, client data, and audit processes meet the highest standards.
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of a data intelligence platform is that it doesn’t force financial institutions to choose between modernization and control. It supports hybrid architectures, empowering organizations to extend their AI capabilities into the cloud while retaining governance and performance on-premises.
The financial services sector cannot afford to fight tomorrow’s fraud with yesterday’s infrastructure. The stakes are too high, the data too complex, and the threats too dynamic. The Gartner report makes a strong case for change: storage must evolve from a passive repository to an intelligent, integrated engine of insight. DDN’s Data Intelligence Platform is the most advanced realization of that vision.
It’s time for financial leaders to stop thinking about storage as a cost center and start viewing data intelligence as a competitive advantage. DDN delivers that advantage with precision, power, and purpose.
Gartner, Stop Buying Storage, Embrace Platforms Instead, By Julia Palmer, Jeff Vogel, Chandra Mukhyala, 15 January 2025
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