ANZ's chief technology officer, Patrick Maes, has underlined the challenge that banks operating across the region can face when attempting to harness cloud computing.Speaking at the CeBIT conference in Sydney yesterday, Maes said that ANZ continued to use its private cloud, rather than a public cloud, because of the need to comply with the "very stringent" regulations regarding data location in the 32 countries in which it operates. He said, given the patchwork quilt of regulations, this made the use of anything other than a private cloud "very complex, and sometimes takes away the economies" generally associated with cloud computing.He said, because of different regulations, "we cannot use Salesforce in Singapore. Private cloud is the only way to guarantee the locality of the data. The moment… [the] public cloud can meet locality requirements it's got a great future."However, he did note there were other problems that needed tackling too. "If the data is in the US, the FBI can walk in and take the data. As a bank, we have to be very careful about the locality."The Commonwealth Bank's adoption of cloud computing, meanwhile, has been picked up as a poster child for the cloud by the Australian Government, which yesterday released its National Cloud Computing Strategy. This is intended to encourage more widespread adoption of cloud services - which is a key use scenario for the National Broadband Network.CBA's use of public, private and hybrid clouds has been used as a case study in the National Strategy, which notes that it has halved the bank's data storage costs, halved test and development costs, and achieved 40 per cent savings where it has been possible to move software to the cloud.