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61% of financial businesses are developing a cloud strategy within their organisation, according to a report from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

The paper, in conjunction with CipherCloud and interviewing over 100 global participants across the financial sector, found that businesses are slowly but surely moving into the cloud, with a mix of leveraging private and public cloud the optimum strategy.

The findings came out of the Financial Services Working Group (FSWG), an organisation within the CSA which provides “knowledge and guidance on how secure cloud solutions can be delivered and managed by the financial industry.” Key trends included:

• While 61% of respondents are developing cloud strategies in their organisations, a third (32%) already have a cloud policy established with 7% having a strict no cloud policy
• For companies who have a strict private cloud only policy the main reasons for this were security concerns (86%), compliance concerns (86%), privacy (79%), data retention and destruction (79%), and data residency concerns (57%)
• The most appealing features financial services providers require from cloud vendors are increased transparency (80%), better data encryption tools (57%) and real-time logs (51%).

The primary reason financial firms adopt cloud computing is flexible infrastructure capacity (68%), reduced time for provisioning (63%) and reduction in total cost of ownership (57%). Interestingly email, usually the most popular cloud app adopted across verticals, was only the third most popular in the CSA report with 43% of the vote, behind app development test environments (46%) and CRM software (46%).

When it came to not adopting cloud, every single respondent cited security as key, ahead of regulatory restrictions (71%) and concerns over public breach notifications (43%).

“The responses overall showed a very active market for cloud services in the financial sector,” said Dr. Chenxi Wang, vice president cloud security and strategy at CipherCloud. “Cloud has made solid inroads in this industry, with many firms looking to harnessing the power of cloud.”

Recent CSA research has found more worries with cloud adoption in regulated industries, with more than 90% of companies polled in a January study unaware of their employees’ shadow IT activity.

You can find the full financial services report here.