Cloud computing: a cross and a delight for banks

Banks and tech companies are closely tied together around the theme of cloud computing, which is advantageous in terms of faster and cheaper services but under observation for possible technical problems that could cause key services to collapse in multiple banks and countries. , leaving customers unable to make payments or access services. Recently, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey also highlighted how the large technology companies that manage cloud computing have concentrated power at their disposal that “can manifest itself in the form of secrecy, opacity, not providing customers with the type of information. they need to monitor the risk in the service “. Bailey explained how a balance must be found between the desire of cloud providers not to disclose too openly the functioning of their technologies also to avoid cyber attacks and the need for open control over possible risks. Google Cloud responded: “We are committed to working with financial services clients and regulators to provide them with controls and assurances over risk management, data localization, transparency and compliance.” The EU also raised the need to operate on critical external services for the financial sector such as the cloud for a more defined and stringent regulation than those currently in place. There is talk of a sector, that of cloud services for banks, which, according to data from the research company IDC, will reach 85 billion dollars globally in 2025, starting from 32.1 billion dollars in 2020. All of this. primarily based on the six leading global cloud service providers: Google, IBM, Microsoft, Alibaba, Amazon and Oracle. Amazon Web Services alone produced more than $ 28 billion in sales in the first six months of the year, a 35% increase over the previous year. One mode of security is that of multicloud. According to a report by technology research firm Gartner Inc., about three-quarters of 850 respondents from medium and large enterprises around the world said they use multiple cloud service providers. This is an operating mode increasingly adopted also by federal agencies and large companies that simultaneously rely on different cloud providers for IT services. The main benefit of doing this is to avoid the risks of being tied to a cloud provider that could change costs out of the blue or lag behind competitors in some cloud-based services. The downside could be that technology vendors often complicate interoperability. Organizations want to use what they perceive as the best features taken from every cloud service provider – from storage to data analytics to AI-related options. Sometimes, companies also set up data storage in multiple clouds to ensure an alternate backup in the event of a service outage or a vendor problem.