As anyone who works in the sector knows, the financial world revolves around data – and this could well see banks become one of the largest adopters of cloud services. However, as Gartner recently noted, the cloud is overhyped in the banking industry and there is still a way to go before institutions capture the transformational benefits. The most important thing, though, is that banks view cloud services as just part of their future IT journey.

Future IT represents the bigger picture – gaining an understanding of the processes, technology and governance needed to support the business objectives. It is about how organisations can then transform the business and remain competitive.

Clearly, all banks have a firm objective to reduce costs and are currently feeling the impact of increased requirements for transaction, compliance and customer data in light of challenging new regulations. As their own data centres draw close to full capacity, many will be considering this big, future IT picture.

Focusing on technology and with the increase of cloud, banks are gradually moving to an era of renting IT, instead of simply making or buying it. While security has historically been an issue, banks are increasingly realising that information is often more at risk in their own environments than it is externally. Nonetheless, with a culture within banking of keeping its data close to its chest, many firms first want to define their overall future IT vision before fully committing to the cloud.

Some critical banking functions may never move offsite, though they will need to be integrated with the cloud-based technologies to form a single unified service. When there is a more firm commitment to the cloud, we may even see ‘bank in a box’ offerings, which package a set of solutions specific for this industry and deliver them as a service.

Future IT and the cloud can seem a complicated world, particularly with so many services available and many more still to come. However, as one of the most IT-savvy industries, banks are well positioned to turn this to their advantage. Each bank will embark on its own future IT journey. The ultimate goal is for this journey to result in a solution that delivers business growth in terms of reducing costs, responding quickly to changing market conditions, speeding up time to market, and enriching the customer experience.