Financial services and the public cloud: Go or no go?
December 25, 2012
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.
Most financial services companies officially forbid the use of public cloud (aka Amazon Web Services) completely. But the forward thinkers among them — like State Street — keep their options — and minds — open about such deployment in the future.
Question: Just how much mission-critical work do financial services firms and companies in other heavily regulated industries put on the public cloud? Answer: It depends on whom you ask. IT execs in financial services — including Chris Perretta, CIO and executive vice president of State Street – say they absolutely do not allow the use of Amazon Web Services at all. Period. (For my purposes, public cloud for now pretty much means AWS). They deal not only with their own top-secret data but with that of clients, which makes a move into a cloud they don’t control a career-limiting decision…
But if you talk to others in the cloud services arena, the answer gets more nuanced. An earlier GigaOM post on this topic sparked a debate on Twitter about just how much CIOs really know about what their devs are doing. My feeling is that many developers even in risk-averse companies get around obstacles to do at least some test-and-dev work in AWS and perhaps even get re-imbursed for it. But when it comes to deployment and use of live data — all that work comes back in-house for deployment…
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/financial-services-and-the-public-cloud-go-or-no-go/