Banks Still Wary Of Using Cloud

Ben Sullivan,
CIO

Cloud survey finds less than half of financial firms lack solidified cloud strategy

Companies that handle your money are still wary of using cloud technologies, with less than half possessing a solid cloud strategy.

This is according to the findings of a Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) survey. Those cautious of the cloud include banks, insurers and investment firms.

Security

Security is of course the main concern for the companies, and with many high profile security incidents recently, who can blame them?

“The results of this report are insightful into understanding how the financial services industry is progressing in terms of cloud adoption and how cloud providers can best serve their interests and needs,” said Jim Reavis, CEO of the CSA.

According to the findings, 61 percent of respondents admitted that a cloud strategy was in the formative stages within their organisation, with 39 to 47 percent planning to use a mix of in-house IT, private, and public clouds, and 18 percent planning to use private clouds. None of the respondents have plans to be hosted mostly in a public cloud.

cloud
Cloud computing security concerns ranked, courtesy of CSA’s March report

The results of the survey also showed that the higher the electronic channel transaction base among a firm’s customers, the less strict the policy with only three percent of these typescloud of organisations indicating having a strict cloud policy in place.

The survey quizzed more than 100 professionals varying in company size and industries from the Americas, EMEA and APAC regions.

Dr Wang, a VP for security and strategy and Ciphercloud, said that there is still plenty of room for growth in cloud for the financial industry, particularly for vendors which can offer up the right security features. It is those who can “fill the void for the auditing and data protection controls” that are at the top of the survey respondents’ cloud wish list.

However, despite cloud concerns, the ever marching transition to cloud is still forging ahead, with the global SME cloud market due to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20.2 percent until 2019.

The prediction came today from Research And Markets, an aptly-named market research company.

The firm said that the scenario is shifting toward SMEs because “they are the ones which can avoid investment on IT infrastructure and reduce operational costs by adopting cloud-based technology for their daily business operations”.

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