Secure and Compliant Cloud Architectures for Finance

The demand for adopting cloud services in the financial sector is surging due to the need for increased operational efficiency, greater scalability, reduced costs, optimized deployment life cycles, easier disaster recovery and mitigation plans against physical damage, and faster time to market. Compliance with the principles of security, risk, and control is necessary to satisfy internal, regulatory, and third-party audit requirements. While commercial clouds offer a broad portfolio of services, including infrastructure, middleware services, platform services, industrialized software as a service, and analytical tools, engineering financial cloud systems according to a standard reference architecture ensures a better assessment of security and compliance characteristics for regulators, risk management teams, and customers.

Cloud computing entails the transformation of computing, networking, storage, and software services away from local installations toward remote, shared, and—especially—distributed service provision. The associated challenges have given rise to a complex set of topics including, but nowhere limited to, data protection, provider availability, manageability, and cloud security and privacy. Ongoing discussions on cloud systems have sharpened management attention to the associated risks and opportunities and given rise to a rapidly evolving regulatory environment. Local, regional, and cross-border regulators have issued guides, policies, reports, opinions, and default contracts with emerging cloud services as the focal point. Both the complexity of the aforementioned issues and the need for adequate solutions have laid the foundation for a domain-oriented extension of cloud computing centered on the financial industry.