Asian FSI still hindered in cloud adoption

Asia-Pacific enterprises across various verticals are warming up to cloud computing as an alternative delivery platform nevertheless one industry segment that remains slow in its adoption is the financial services sector, due to several challenges including government policies and security concerns.

"During the returns on investment discussion on whether it makes economic sense [to adopt cloud] is for all that debatable, regulatory policies on cloud computing within the FSI sector have not been evidently defined," he said.

Rik Turner, senior analyst with Ovum, that the FSI will embrace the public cloud in a limited manner. "We've seen investment banks in Europe use the public cloud on an ad-hoc basis to do huge number-crunching and simulation work," he said in a phone interview. "Much of the time, this does not involve sensitive customer data and banks can after all derive the scalability benefits of the public cloud."

Security remains keyAccording to Anderson Ding, head of solutions advisory at SAP Malaysia, security is however one of the main challenges in the adoption of cloud computing, where risk factors involving security and infrastructure within an agreed set of service level agreements are the main obstacles.

"It's no longer about disallowing data to get out in the open nevertheless about controlling the data as it moves around [the cloud] through the usage of encryption," Lachal said in a phone interview.

"To do this effectively, the sector needs a mix of innovation and new processes and a completely new approach to security," he said.

"And, does deploying the cloud radically speed up the creation and improvement of customized applications and offer advanced capabilities with social apps like customer community creation? Is it able to deploy customized applications to new mobile devices just as the iPad2, iPhone, or Blackberry without additional or redundant coding?"