In an effort to meet regulatory concerns over Internet "cloud" data storage, ANZ is adopting technology to encrypt customer data stored in its cloud-based customer relationship management system.In an interview posted online yesterday, ANZ chief technology officer Dr Patrick Maes said ANZ was using CipherCloud encryption to enable the use of the Salesforce CRM system while staying within regulatory boundaries.He also said that to comply with regulatory requirements the bank did not keep a master copy of any customer data on a public or hybrid cloud.Dr Maes made the comments in a video posted on the ITnews website yesterday and recorded at a Gartner symposium earlier this month.At the same symposium, ANZ chief information officer Anne Weatherston was reported as predicting that the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority would toughen its stance on cloud computing.She reportedly described the attitude of the Singaporean central bank and prudential regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, as "absolutely, categorically no cloud". And she told her audience that APRA held the view that Australia would follow its lead, ITnews said.Dr Maes said the bank had to navigate a series of "extreme positions" held by the various regulators in the 35 countries in which it operated, from that of Laos to that of Singapore. In Laos "everything is possible", he said, while in Singapore "you cannot outsource customer data outside your Singapore presence".APRA has not outlawed cloud computing. But, since 2010, it has urged banks to ensure that if they adopt cloud computing they have appropriate business continuity arrangements in place to maintain that data's availability, confidentiality and integrity, and to ensure compliance with regulatory and prudential requirements.Maes said ANZ had "come up with a CipherCloud proposition" to deal with regulators' data storage concerns. As a result, ANZ could take a pragmatic approach to cloud computing, and it did not plan to block business users within ANZ from using public or private clouds "where that makes sense".CipherCloud acts as an encryption gateway to the Salesforce application, depersonalising and encrypting all data before it enters the public cloud. It is already being used locally by Medibank.While CipherCloud's website does not make mention of ANZ by name, it does acknowledge its technology has been adopted by a leading Australian bank (which it claims operates in five countries) so as to ensure compliance with Australia's national privacy principles.It says: "CipherCloud's data protection solution will allow the bank to obtain buy-off from regulators on this new model of using cloud-based applications while storing all sensitive customer information within their borders. The bank is now in the process of defining their enterprise cloud strategy, which will allow hundreds of additional bank employees to use cloud-based applications."The company claims CipherCloud allows banks to satisfy data residency requirements and also "eliminate the risk of foreign jurisdiction being applicable to your sensitive data". Many industries are concerned that US cloud-based data storage cannot be used because the US's Patriot Act allows US authorities to inspect cloud data.