It seems the financial services industry is growing more comfortable with the idea of cloud computing every day. We're seeing lots of HR, marketing and "internal" data-centric operations being moved to clouds. So, which projects might be good candidates for such treatment?

"First movers are likely to be the functions banks deem as commodities rather than mission-critical or competitive differentiators," writes one commentator in On Windows.  But in a sense, critical trading functions are also being transitioned.

The always thoughtful Larry Tabb suggests that colocation centers are de facto clouds. And "if the pace of technology development continues, and firms increasingly leverage colocation and proximity centers for their trading applications, and these colocation centers become de facto cloud support centers, we may see the demise of the corporate data center much sooner than I originally estimated," he said in Wall Street & Technology. Here's his logic.

It's fair to say that companies across the spectrum have to be thinking about their internal data centers and what the future holds for them. Perhaps the internal data center of the future is simply some form of an internal cloud. Or maybe the comfort level with external clouds is changing fast enough that the traditional corporate data center goes away.

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