The Commonwealth Bank has revealed some of the compelling economics behind its embrace of cloud computing, claiming that it is possible to achieve savings of up to 40 per cent by moving computer processing to a cloud service.The bank is scheduled to migrate the commbank.com website on to the Amazon cloud before Christmas. The bank's chief information officer, Michael Harte, said yesterday that the bank was also using cloud computing extensively for test and development.He claimed that cloud-based platforms could be rolled out for a tenth of the cost "of trying to do that internally with our own capital." Harte claimed that it used to take eight weeks and cost thousands of dollars to provide a server on premises for applications such as test and development.Using cloud services this now took eight minutes and cost just 25 cents, he said. There was, he argued, "no point in running our own infrastructure for... utility purposes." Harte said that as long as cloud service providers were able to comply with data sovereignty and security expectations there were no reasons not to use cloud services. However, he said that CBA customer data would not be stored in a public cloud.