The shifting approach to management of bank data may raise a few issues for financial regulators, but ones that they and banks can manage.In his talk to CEDA last week, Michael Harte, chief information officer at Commonwealth Bank, said that banks working in concert would define how they would want to buy cloud computing services, the standards they would require, and the way in which data can be treated, stored and processed. "Then we're probably on to something that the regulators will support as well, because we'll easily show how we can do it securely, but we'll show them that we can reduce operating cost and risk."One of the challenges associated with cloud computing is that many third-party clouds exist as international networks of computers. Users of third-party cloud services may not necessarily know where their data is physically located, which can lead to regulatory or legislative compliance headaches.Harte clearly believes that big banks working together with regulators and vendors will be able to overcome these issues.According to Harte the agility promised by a move to cloud computing is essential for banks that wish to react nimbly to changing market conditions and customer expectations.He told the CEDA audience that at present the bank spends almost $500 million annually on infrastructure, and only $150 million on "customer interactivity".  Clearly Harte wants to reduce the former so he can invest more in the latter, which is where any sort of competitive advantage to be derived from IT can be leveraged.At the CEDA event in Sydney last week Harte was categorical: "We're saying that we will never buy another data centre. We will never buy another rack or server or storage device or network device again."I will never let any organisation that I work for get locked into proprietary hardware or software again. I'll never tell my teams in the business that it will be weeks to get them hardware provision. I'll never pay upfront for any infrastructure and certainly would never pay for any, or rent any, infrastructure that I would never use."I will never implement an internal solution for a common problem that I could procure on subscription across the web," said Harte, in what amounted to a resounding thumbs-up for cloud computing.Banks that don't make the transition to a cloud style platform are doomed, he warned: "I'd say that if you're not doing it, your marginal costs of computers is actually growing at more than 20 and probably up to about 30 per cent on a compound annual growth rate and that's a recipe for gradually going out of business."