INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Financial services move
to the cloud
S
enior IT executives in the financial services industry
understand that cloud computing infrastructure can
boost the value of their services and offerings by greatly
reducing the problems of managing what has become
commoditised infrastructure. In addition, cloud can
ensure that resources that are already stretched can be used for strategic
and other initiatives that will add value.
To successfully harness the power of cloud, businesses need to run
mission-critical applications in the cloud with enterprise-class levels of
availability, security and connectivity. And they need to do this while
remaining flexible, and having the capacity to expand when needed.
Richard Vester, Director at EOH cloud Services, says cloud
technologies are very attractive and becoming more and more relevant
to the financial services market. ‘These companies want a model that
lets the business assets be used optimally, often by many people at once,
whenever possible.’
Historically, he says the larger banks have migrated less of their
activity to the cloud than newer, smaller ones. ‘There are several
reasons for this. Legacy systems play a role, as do the compliance and
regulatory issues around data privacy, and, of course, security. However,
the constant pressure to lower spending is changing this, particularly in
today’s tough economic climate. There can be no doubt that moving
services and systems into the cloud will greatly reduce spend.’
For example, says Vester, banks are beginning to outsource the
processing of data that is not particularly sensitive, but still requires
a lot of processing power and resources. In addition, larger financial
institutions are also using the cloud as a means to test their systems and
processes. In this way, the cloud can function as a safe environment,
which can mirror the bank’s systems, and make changes, or run updates
without the possible risk of crashing the entire bank’s systems.
However, he says there are still many stumbling blocks to the wider
adoption of cloud in financial services. ‘I’ve already mentioned the
security and privacy implications. For smaller entities this isn’t as big
a concern, as the larger cloud providers are most likely more stable
and secure than an environment they would build themselves. Larger
banks that have already invested hugely in top security measures,
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