Banks to embrace private clouds?

There's certainly been a lot of talk recently about cloud computing and the financial services industry. The great public cloud vendor Amazon was only too happy to talk up the idea for hedge fund managers recently. While the idea of public cloud computing may not sit well with a lot of financial services firms, the idea of private clouds and public-private hybrid clouds seem more palatable. Still, the transition is hardly in full swing.

ComputerWorld notes that at ING, "for which has a few private cloud pilot projects in the works, a seamless hybrid setup is years away." That reflects the reality of today's management tools. One executive tells the magazine that managing such hybrids isn't exactly seamless; there are some obvious issues. For example, "if IT pushed workloads into public cloud computing services today, in-house administrators would not be able to manage the workloads in those external data centers. Those workloads would run wherever the service provider's policies deemed appropriate. Cross-cloud policy management doesn't exist."

We'll likely get there someday however, as more people embrace the cloud concept broadly. According to Gartner, enterprise spending on public and private cloud infrastructure services will total $3.2 billion this year, up 28 percent from $2.5 billion in 2008. Indeed, the consultancy ranks cloud computing at the top of its list of top 10 technologies for 2010. 

For more:
- here's the ComputerWorld article

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