Yesterday we announced the findings of our 2nd Annual Financial Services Cloud Computing survey and it has produced some revealing insights into the mindset of IT professionals. Like last year, we interviewed 35 senior financial services IT executives and the headline result was that 83% are making private clouds their first priority in moving to a cloud model. This is very encouraging and something we have heard in conversations from many organizations in different industries around the world.
However, while our study showed that adoption of cloud may have been delayed as a result of the global recession it importantly has not been dismissed entirely. In fact, our findings indicate that in the last 12 months more organizations have incorporated cloud into their long term planning, and many are planning to increase investments in grid and HPC in preparation.
One of the highlights of our study was the transformation in knowledge and understanding of cloud that has taken place in the last year. In our 2008 study, we found the biggest hurdles being cloud’s infancy and lack of definition. 12 months on and the barriers have changed to more practical issues such as security concerns and network reliability. On these points we would argue that the security protocols that exist in many infrastructures today will apply to the cloud so security should not be a major barrier, and regarding network availability, this can be easily resolved through good business continuity planning.
Full adoption of cloud looks like some way off but banks are preparing themselves through investments in virtualization, grid and HPC. The next stage will be the deployment of cloud management software. When we see an increase in the take-up of this technology, we will know that private clouds will have moved from vision to reality.
David Warm
CTO Financial Services
Platform Computing
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