Article Series - Does cloud computing change IT architecture in Banking

Over the past one year , i have been hearing about the word "Cloud Computing" from many technology companies. There was attending seminars over a couple on months on cloud computing in Singapore and i find two of them very interesting.

First one was from MAS (Monetary Authority of Singapore) at SMU and second was from Amazon web services the largest provider of cloud computing services. Each of them have totally opposite opinion on cloud computing.

To tell you some thing about cloud computing  in one sentence , it a computing service exposed to public over internet. That means , you have to pay for the usage of service and only pay as much as you use the service. Just like your utility bill. As in the case of utilities like water and electricity , the user are unaware of how the drinking water , from where did the drinking water come from , similar is the case with Cloud Computing , the user will be unaware of how is the underlying IT infrastructure scaled , or where is the IT infrastructure available , they just use the service and pay for it.

The MAS speaker was concerned about the banks to expose their data on a public cloud. Banks can save a lot of money , if they are able to minimize the cost of their operations. When they start to use the cloud , they can pay as less as 5 USD per hour of the server computing services , but the concern from MAS was that , is that computing service secure enough to protect the depositors information.

The Amazon speaker has given the big picture on how many firms are converting from traditional IT infrastructure set up to cloud computing services and more interesting was there were some of US government agencies started using cloud computing as their primary computing source of IT infrastructure. This clearly shows that cloud computing service has the required security controls in place.

I think the real big gap between the above two groups is the way they look at the security concerns prevailing over cloud computing. Once , this gap is clearly understood and perceived by both the groups , then only can the real era of cloud computing will start in the world of banking.