Banker S.A. April 2014 | Page 51

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, Edition 9 BANKER SA IT.indd 49 49 2014/04/07 9:14 AM