Financial firms planning to incorporate cloud-based computing and storage within their businesses need to prepare to take a deep dive into the complexities of multi-cloud computing.

“A lot of conversations start as finding ways that companies can offset some of their workloads by deploying some into Amazon, Azure, or the cloud of their choice,” said Neal Secher, managing director, network architecture at BNY Mellon and panel discussion participant during the HPC For Wall Street Conference in midtown Manhattan.

However, organizations should understand the reason why they want to migrate part of their infrastructure into public clouds before adopting the architecture, suggested fellow panelist Jason Tavares, US head of engineering services at Nomura Securities.

“Is it because the company wants to transform capital expenditures into operational expenditures,” he asked. “From there, it is a matter of driving consensus with your business stakeholder, especially in the financial services industry.”

“You cannot just dip your toe into the pool and see this as a simple cost or infrastructure optimization play,” said panelist Bryson Hopkins, director, global solutions architecture at Equinix. “The way you architect cloud changes fundamentally the way you build core applications your core applications. It is more than just providing additional processing or storage capacity.”

BNY Mellon’s Secher suggested that firms abstract what they plan to move into the cloud as much as possible.

“You need to make your workloads and processes as portable as possible and not get locked into one particular cloud architecture,” he said.

Nomura’s Tavares and Dave Malik, senior director, solutions integration architect, advanced services at Cisco, also agreed that planning to run in a multi-cloud environment is extremely practical.

“Firms need to think about hybrid clouds because they will be operating in a hybrid cloud environment,” said Malik. “It’s inevitable.”

Equinix’s Hopkins backed up Malik’s view citing Gartner Group research data that stated that half of all mission critical applications would run in the cloud by 2018.

“The industry is getting there and is ready to move forward,” he added.

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