Cloud computing a bank fashion

The lure of cloud computing models is that organisations pay for what computing services they need when they need them. Well-constructed clouds can be quickly grown, changed or shrunk to meet demand.

Not surprising the banks like the sound of them.

Commonwealth Bank chief information officer Michael Harte is already running a private storage cloud using Oracle and Sun technology in the bank, which he claims is the first of its kind in the world. Getting the storage cloud working well will be his proof of concept for cloud use by the CBA.

"As you move up the stack from storage though mainframe to server-distributed computing and then applications and information, we are learning progressively how to unitise and make more granular services," said Harte.

(This is an important first step in any migration to cloud-based computing where users are charged according to their usage.)

While initially the CBA's focus will be on tightly controlled internal clouds that  it can monitor and manage, longer term Harte foresees the bank moving to hybrid clouds, which would be shared by it and third-party partners, and eventually to entirely public clouds for non mission critical applications - "To the extent that we can find providers that can provide that, get out of utility functions and do so at low risk and at the right price - then we will have them do it while we will retain the core and invest in value-creating assets."

Other sectors are also exploring the concept and already many Australian universities have offloaded their email applications to public clouds run by Google or Microsoft.

At present the bank is experimenting with cloud storage, and managing all the security and regulatory compliance issues itself. Longer term Harte envisages working with "people like VMware, EMC, Cisco, IBM and HP."

Harte added, "We set up enterprise services just over a year ago and have a three-year roadmap to make as many of these services cloud-like over the next three years as we can, because the game is to get out of utility functions and reinvest that money in value enhancing activities and assets.

"That way we free up investment for strategic service assets - the innovations, the services and the products that our customers want and appreciate. We move from being a utility provider and direct our resources where we are really adding value."