There have been a great number of articles in recent times of established banks adopting the cloud and enjoying all the ensuing cost savings they can make. We thought we'd collate some of the best stories about Cloud usage in financial services:

• State Street $600 Million Savings Goal through private Cloud. Chris Perretta, executive VP and CIO of State Street Bank says:

The cloud represents significant savings in our overall operating environment, internally, our goal is to drastically reduce the amount of code we have to write by 30-40%. We want to reduce test time 30%. These are conservative, achievable goals. We are starting to see the benefits as we start to write for the cloud.

• Commonwealth Bank CIO dismisses security, data sovereignty as cloud barriers. Michael Harte, the CIO of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia has been a long time proponent of the Cloud. In the article he talks about the cost saving:

We've halved storage costs, we've halved most of our app testing and development cost. We've got a wide range of technology functions as a service. We've got application development, testing, infrastructure, software and storage.

Harte said the bank was looking for a 40% improvement in pricing across everything that we consume as a service:

• The majority of UK financial services firms believe the cloud is a key enabler for their business strategies. A study done by Fujitsu revealed that 60 percent of banks believe that [cloud computing] will help them achieve their business strategies. In addition 64 percent believed that cloud computing was a key enabler of change within their organisation.
  
  

Hopefully some food for thought for those that still think this is a passing fad!