(17 December 2009 – Global) Deutsche Bank and Commonwealth Bank Australia (CBA) have signed up to the new global Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council (ECBC).The industry association responsible for setting up the council to promote cloud technology, TM Forum, has said that the ECBC has been established to help understand the needs of the largest global cloud buyers and to ensure that any impediments to the uptake of cloud technology are removed.
Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure ‘in the cloud’ that supports them.
The ECBC has identified several areas they will be working on including common cloud services, product definitions, security issues, interoperability, data portability, API’s, service provider benchmarking and network performance and latency issues.
Eric Pulier, executive director, ECBC, said that the ECBC represents an opportunity to affect the global information technology marketplace, bringing transparency and efficiency to the relationship between buyers and sellers. By lowering the gating factors for widespread adoption of cloud services, the ECBC can accelerate the shift to the next era in computing.
Despite CBA and Deutsche Bank supporting the ECBC, a survey from TechMarket View for vendor Temenos of 45 bank executives revealed that cloud computing is yet to gain real support amongst banks.
The reason behind the lack of banking support is that banks are concerned about the security and potential risks of a technology they view as immature.
The survey did however show that banks accept the potential to save money associated with cloud computing, with nearly half of survey respondents seeing the technology as a means to cut infrastructure costs and over a third saying it would give more cost flexibility.
Yet only 15 percent of respondents were tapping into the technology with a third admitting they simply don’t know enough about the potential risks and 44 percent citing the lack of data security as a significant barrier to adoption.