Cloud

From an infrastructure level, external cloud offerings are a natural evolution of managed service and utility hosting models.

Usage based and elastic cost models can look attractive when compared to internal enterprise IT costs and some early adoption is appearing within the FS industry, especially for grid, test, development, email, collaboration and desktop environments.

BUT significant IT risk concerns prevent wholesale adoption of external cloud services (especially public cloud) today in data-sensitive industries like financial services. For instance, we expect dedicated and public cloud services to account for less than 10% of a tier-1 investment bank’s IT footprint before 2015.

In the mean-time, we are helping clients design, build and implement in-house private clouds to realize some of the benefits of cloud computing in the short term (cloud-likeness), while allowing an easier transition to external dedicated and public clouds in the future (cloud readiness).