According to a survey conducted by Bank Systems and Technology in conjunction with Information Week Anaytics, 73 percent of respondents in the banking industry stated that they would be able to meet demand and achieve the needed degree of scale in the cloud.
In an article that appeared in BankTech, Accuenture’s financial services division expert David Boyle claimed that those in the banking industry are “looking at the infrastructure they use for development and testing, and they’re looking to access and leverage lower-cost environments they can tap via the cloud.” In his experiences working with major banks in the U.S., some have moved all testing and development operations into the cloud as standard practice to better manage provisioning and resources.
Despite the optimistic view that falls in line with others from major research groups who predict massive cloud movement in the next few years, only “42 percent of bankers plan to deliver just 1 percent to 9 percent of IT services over the cloud in the next 24 months.” The survey goes on to note that more than a third of respondents (37 percent) expect to deliver 10 percent to 25 percent of IT services over a cloud over the next two years” and that only a small number had plans to take anything over one-quarter of their tech virtual in the same amount of time.”
The march to the cloud is gaining momentum, but at this point, it’s only in theory rather than in practice. The same holds true for others who are understandably cautious about taking any of their mission-critical operations into virtual space. Testing and development is a start, but it might be some years before the cloud is the standard for anything outside of resource-heavy tasks like application development and testing.