
As more businesses move their operations into the cloud, large scale international financial institutions such as J.P. Morgan and BNY Mellon have found it difficult to justify the risk of putting data inside the cloud.
Boston recently hosted the Sibos conference which is a convention that synced up many of the banking industries biggest technology executives. At this conference, cloud was a major topic and many the banking industries top technology executives made candid comments about cloud’s role in the future of international banking.
Lee Fulmer is the Chief Technology Officer at J.P. Morgan and at the conference, he posed the question, “Data is a competitive asset, why would I outsource that?” Fulmer added, “That’s parking the legal ramifications.”
Fulmer expounded upon the legal ramifications saying, “The market infrastructure doesn’t have the integrity that allows me not to go to jail if my outsourcing provider does something wrong.”
Paul Ventisei, Vice President of Software Architecture at HSBC, also shared skepticism regarding cloud’s role within international banking. Ventisei said, “The cloud is people in their garage writing code; they don’t care about security. We care much more about security. You have to make sure there’s a third party checking processes, checking for liability insurance. None of that is there right now.”
The keywords that Ventisei said were “Right now.” Ventisei says he does believe that cloud will be able to be used within the banking industry. He added, “I think it will get there, I hope it does get there. I don’t think we want to continue running big IT operations.”
Ventisei continued, “When you look at the future of data centers, it’s clear that as big as HSBC is, we’re going to be subscale when it comes to data centers sooner…With the scale and size of what’s being built, to not use that in future is unlikely.”