Financial institutions struggle to manage costs in an environment made more complex by increasing customer and regulatory demands. Cloud computing offers a fundamentally different way to deliver resources at a lower cost by moving these resources from a fixed to a variable cost base. Although cloud computing can reduce operating costs in many operational areas, desktop applications, storage and software development are several workloads that lend themselves to cloud. For example, moving development and testing to a cloud environment can accelerate software delivery and reduce the time to market for new products. Since cloud computing represents a transformational opportunity, financial institutions should create a cloud strategy to determine the workloads most appropriate for the cloud and select the right delivery model, believes Anthony Lipp, global strategy leader, IBM Banking and Financial Markets
