Finance is already an outlier in terms of IT costs. The industry devotes 10.5% of total revenue to IT—and on average, each financial industry IT staffer supports only 15.7 users, the fewest of any industry.

All over the world, financial services companies are facing skyrocketing compliance costs. Almost half the respondents to a recent Accenture survey of compliance officers in 13 countries said they expected 10% to 20% increases, and nearly one in five are expecting increases of more than 20%.

Much of this is driven by international banking regulations. At the beginning of this year, the Common Reporting Standard went into effect. An anti-tax-evasion measure signed by 142 countries, the CRS requires financial institutions to provide detailed account information to the home governments of virtually every sizeable depositor.

Just to keep things exciting, the U.S. government hasn’t signed on to CRS; instead we require banks doing business with Americans to comply with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of 2010. Which requires—surprise, surprise—pretty much the same thing as CRS, but reported differently.

And these are just two examples of the compliance burden the financial sector must deal with. Efficiently, and within a budget. In a recent interview by ValueWalk entitled “Compliance Costs Soaring for Financial Institutions,” Condusiv® CEO Jim D’Arezzo said, “Financial firms must find a path to more sustainable compliance costs.”

Speaking to the site’s audience (ValueWalk is a site focused on hedge funds, large asset managers, and value investing) D’Arezzo noted that finance is already an outlier in terms of IT costs. The industry devotes 10.5% of total revenue to IT, more than government, healthcare, retail, or anybody else. It’s also an outlier in terms of IT staff load; on average, each financial industry IT staffer supports only 15.7 users, the fewest of any industry. (Government averages 37.8 users per IT staff employee.)

To ease these difficulties, D’Arezzo recommends that the financial industry consider advanced technologies that provide cost-effective ways to enhance overall system performance. “The only way financial services companies will be able to meet the compliance demands being placed on them, and at the same time meet their efficiency and profitability targets, will be to improve the efficiency of their existing capacity—especially as regards I/O reduction.”

At Condusiv, that’s our business. We’ve seen users of our I/O reduction software solutions increase the capability of their storage and servers, including SQL servers, by 30% to 50% or more. In some cases, we’ve seen results as high as 10X initial performance—without the need to purchase a single box of new hardware.

If you’re interested in reducing the two biggest silent killers of your SQL performance, download a free 30-day trial of DymaxIO fast data software and boost your  I/O performance now.

For an explanation of why your heaviest workloads are only processing half the throughput they should from VM to storage, view this short video.