Survey reveals financial organisations looking to Cloud

Platform Computing, provider of cluster, grid and cloud management software, has revealed that 83 percent of financial firms are making private clouds their first priority in moving to a cloud model, according to its second annual survey.

Furthermore, the majority (83 percent) of respondents plan to increase their investment in grid and high performance computing (HPC) in the next 12 months as part of their plans to incorporate cloud within the IT infrastructures.

While the financial crisis appears to have pushed back the wider adoption of cloud computing, nearly all respondents to the survey of senior IT execs said that HPC was a major stepping stone in moving toward cloud computing. Moreover, virtualisation remains a major focus for organisations with 43 percent making it their main infrastructure priority for 2010. The main reasons cited for the focus on these two technologies were to reduce costs (31 percent) and increase processing power (37 percent).

David Warm, CTO, Financial Services Business Unit, Platform Computing, says: “Our second annual survey has seen a transformation take place in the industry, driven primarily by the global economic downturn. While we have continued to see tremendous interest in HPC and virtualisation technologies to support cost reduction and processing power requirements, we have also seen the awareness and understanding of cloud rise significantly over the last 12 months. While full adoption of cloud appears some way off, banks are certainly preparing themselves for it with the adoption of private clouds.”

The survey reports a shift in awareness and understanding of cloud computing among senior IT executives in the last year. In the 2008 survey, respondents said that cloud computing’s relative infancy (29 percent) and lack of definition (29 percent) were the biggest hurdles. According to the latest survey findings, 46 percent of respondents cited security as the number one barrier to cloud computing and only six percent claimed reliability and availability of services as a major factor.

Interestingly, this is at odds with research published last week that stated that confusion still reigned over cloud computing.