HSBC official fears jail over cloud breaches

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

A senior official at HSBC has expressed concerns that IT bosses could end up behind bars due to loose regulation in the financial services sector. Speaking at Cloud Expo Europe, head of Research and Innovation Barry Childe said regulators have not yet created adequate standards around cloud services, which could create risks for those using them, V3 reports.

He explained: "Right now a financial services IT professional is at risk if he outsources a service elsewhere and a leak happens. There is a risk that he would potentially go to prison. There’s no get out of jail free card because he used a third party. "We need a code of conduct of due diligence. We need a standard to allow financial services firms to work with third parties."…

Mr Childe advocated a situation where the third party providing cloud services could be one that had regulatory approval following sufficient scrutiny, so that IT chiefs could demonstrate they had taken all possible steps to ensure they were dealing with service providers with accreditation as reliable operators.

Despite these concerns, the official added that he believes cloud computing has a great deal to offer the banking sector and said those working in the IT sector should seek to create cloud-based applications to offer solutions for the financial sector.

However, it may not just be financial services regulations that need improving to help ensure the cloud is used more by the industry. Another issue is the danger of cloud computing outages, which could disrupt services.

Writing for the Tech Page One website earlier this week, chief technology officer at the Dell Technology Enterprise Centre said this problem has become less frequent in recent months, but noted it is important for services to be designed so that downtime can factored into the use of products.

This may still mean banks will need to avoid using the cloud until outages can be almost eliminated, as disruption to their services can be a major problem when customers are trying to use their cards to pay for goods and services over the counter or draw cash from ATMs.

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