Most surveys of bankers about cloud computing indicate that their biggest worry is security. But research released earlier this month by NTT Com Security found the key factor financial executives consider when evaluating a new delivery mechanism for an application, by a wide margin, was cost: 80% cited it. NTT interviewed 700 "IT decision makers" at companies with more than 500 employees in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Nordics.
The financial services firms queried mostly use their own data centers today: 41% predominantly use a corporate-owned data center to deliver compute resources. Almost a quarter (22%) refer to their main source of computing as a private cloud; 22% use a third party hosted data center. Far fewer (13%) say they use a hybrid cloud and 2% say they make use of a public cloud.
The financial services executives that do use a hybrid or public cloud say they devote, on average, 25% of their IT budget to cloud computing.
North American businesses in general are far more committed to the cloud: 94% interviewed said cloud-based operations have been part of their infrastructure for six months or longer.
