Accenture, the IT consultancy reported this year that “cloud computing will increasingly provide banks with new lower cost operating models thanks to virtualisation, greater automation, and the ability to push more activities offshore.”

What does this mean?

In years to come, we should start seeing banks handing a lot of their online infrastructure over to managed hosting companies.

The multiple benefits of managed hosting have already started becoming apparent and many banks are taking strategic measures to incorporate more and more cloud software into their already existing legacy systems. They have started moving non-critical business components over the cloud, such as HR and procurement.

This is reducing internal IT complexity as well as costs.

Still some way to go

Many countries are wary of cloud hosting and question its security. As such, there are still many regulations as to the storage of critical data, in particular the manipulation of confidential …