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Survey confirms banks’ growing confidence in the public cloud

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Financial firms are ahead of other industry verticals in their adoption of the public cloud, according to Capgemini’s annual World Quality Report. The consulting firm found the 18% of financial firms cloud-based applications are now in the public cloud, ahead of the 17.5% average across industries. However, the  survey also found firms are being increasingly selective as to which apps they have hosted on the cloud. The annual survey is on interviews with 1,600 individuals on the subject of their firms’ quality assurance practices and covers the automotive, retail, energy, healthcare, technology, public sector and financial services industries. While financial firms have expressed reservations about using the public cloud in the past, traditionally risk-averse banks are increasingly trusting of the technology and willing to expose data online. Capital One, a leading US retail banking and card company, went public last year with its plans to move more apps to the public cloud. CIO Rob Alexander  said that Capital One and Amazon Web Services had developed a security model that: “Enables us to securely in the public cloud than we can do in our own data centers.” Alexander said that Capital One plans to reduce the number of its data centers from eight to three by 2018 as a result of its move to the public cloud. According to Govindarajan Muthukrishnan, global testing head for financial services at Capgemini and co-author of the World Quality Report, it is thanks to the secure services that cloud providers have brought to the market that banks have become leading cloud adopters, despite growing concerns about data breaches and cyber crime. Fewer firms now distinguish between testing they conduct in the cloud and testing they do on other platforms, said Muthukrishnan. According to the Capgemini survey, across all industries, the percentage of firms conducting security and performance testing of apps on the cloud are up one percent from last year to 53% in both cases. However, Muthukrishnan also added: “Banks are not putting their core services on the cloud anymore. They are using it for their digital applications while keeping their core services on-premises.” While firms may be feeling more comfortable in the cloud, they are faced with some major challenges in quality assurance. Mobile presents more challenges than ever, as a complex variety of tools, devices, and methodologies proliferate, according to the World Quality Report. As many as 48% of respondents across all industries say they do not have the right testing process in place for mobile; up from last year’s figure of 28%. Nearly half of respondents cite lack a of mobile testing experts and in-house testing environments. For financial firms specifically, the proliferation of apps raises the challenge of managing and integrating data flows and 42% of financial firms say that the lack test data for integration projects is a problem. Unsurprisingly, security is the number one priority for financial firms, the survey confirms, with 67% respondents from the sector ranking security issues as  “important”or “very important”. Respondents said that security testing takes precedence over both functional testing or load testing as banks become proactive in bolstering their defences. — See our video interview with Govindarajan Muthukrishnan, global head of testing for the financial services an co-author of the World Quality Report here.