Cloud computing has reached a ‘tipping point’ in financial services with capabilities and cost efficiencies moving ahead of on-premise data centre equivalents, according to The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC).
The company, which provides financial transaction and data processing services for the global financial industry, has issued a new report, titled ‘Moving Financial Market Infrastructure to the Cloud’. The tipping point, the report argues, comes from a change in questioning on cloud services; the conversation moves forward from ‘is the cloud safe?’ to ‘what compromises are we making by staying on-premises?’
DTCC itself says it has leveraged cloud services for almost five years, and is therefore looking at methods of expansion, with the proof of the pudding in the eating.
The report goes through the usual rigmarole of outlining software, infrastructure, and platform as a service, as well as discussing benefits such as scale, resiliency, privacy, security and cost. The paper also notes that public cloud vendors have significantly upped their game in recent years.
“The leading cloud vendors are at the forefront of security implementation and research, enabling them to attract and retain the top global talent,” the report notes. “Very few companies can replicate the reliability and built-in automation and processes of a public vendor that is installing tens of thousands of individual servers every day and monitoring and trouble-shooting tens of millions of active network components.”
Regulation is another important area DTCC goes into. While many of the concerns over cloud providers are similar to those across the regulatory community, the report notes, the four primary areas to move through are data protection and sensitivity, data integrity, continuity of service, and auditing issues.
“We believe cloud computing has moved past a tipping point and that the security, scalability, resiliency, recoverability and cost of applications in the cloud are better than many private enterprises could achieve on their own,” said Robert Garrison, DTCC CIO. “As a result, we will pursue a strategy of building a cloud ecosystem that supports best practices and standards.
“At the same time, we take seriously our responsibility to be in full compliance with all relevant regulatory requirements and pledge to work in collaboration with our supervisors to achieve this.”
You can read the full report here (registration required).