Cloud computing began to enter the banking industry

After almost a decade of hesitation, the global banking industry has finally begun to take a more aggressive approach toward cloud computing, believing in cloud computing and bringing their data to the cloud.

According to data provided by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 71% of bank executives worldwide said in a recent survey that they plan to increase their investment in cloud computing by about four times the amount of investment last year. One reason for this shift, said Julien Courbe, PwC's head of financial services technology, is that the services that public cloud service providers provide to banks are safer and more reliable. Many customers are beginning to consider investing in many large technology companies, providing mobile applications and data to the public cloud. This is a major change. Most of the investment banks so far have been in the private cloud, so that banks can have a greater degree of control and management. It also makes the stakeholders more comfortable.

Courbe said we now see a solution for banks investing in public clouds. To increase security, cloud service providers encrypt data for storage and shipping, and they also make substantial investments in identity and access management. In addition, another change is that mid-range banks skip the middle steps of private cloud implementation and go directly to the public cloud.

According to research firm surveys, IaaS (including computing resources, storage and printing services) is the fastest-growing segment. This year, Gartner predicts that the global public cloud services market will grow by 18.5%, from 111 billion in 2012 to 131 billion in 2013.

Major global public cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Rackspace have declared strong use of cloud computing so far this year.

In April, Amazon announced that more than two trillion objects were stored on the Amazon S3 service platform, servicing more than 1.1 million requests per second. The company said on its blog, "It took less than a year for a storage object to grow from zero to one trillion, but it took less than a year from a trillion to two trillions." In July, the Dutch banking regulator Approve financial organizations to use Amazon Web Services. The storage and management of data at all levels in the AWS cloud, and the use of technologies provided by third-party vendors running on AWS, are all within this approval.

In April this year, Microsoft's Windows Azure software and related projects for the first time annual sales of more than one billion US dollars. Google said five million businesses use Google's enterprise applications.

Courbe said this is a movement that will continue to accelerate. He predicts that in about 15 years there will be only about five or six data centers in the world.

The bank's first use case for cloud computing is the testing and development of applications. This is a natural choice because applications are thoroughly tested and typically require three to six months, although it requires a large amount of computing resources, so it does not make sense to invest in equipment to test. In the next phase of the bank's adoption of cloud computing, they began to apply human resources, accounting and applications to the public cloud. In a recent example, Standard Bank South Africa said it plans to apply human resources to the cloud as a pre-cloud test.

Our country's banks also need cloud computing.

In recent years, China's banking sector has experienced leaps and bounds and its industry scale has been continuously expanded. However, with such rapid development, the market is becoming increasingly fierce competition, rising costs, customer needs become more complex and other challenges. At the same time, with the overall adjustment of the banking industry in China, the government has set extremely high demands on the development of China's banking industry, further increasing the pressure on bank restructuring.

As a brand new business model, cloud computing is uniquely capable of helping domestic banks play an all-round role in promoting changes in marketing modes, cross-sectoral cooperation, service capabilities and operational efficiency.