Banking on the cloud- IBM woos local banks to the new trading floor

By James Ratemo

Cloud computing, the Internet based computing where shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, is gaining prominence among corporates.

Over the past two years, businesses have begun to explore the cloud model as a means to optimize their own IT infrastructure and to leverage external public cloud services based on the characteristics of their workloads and their business needs.

A survey by IBM revealed the primary drivers for cloud adoption in general are cost savings and faster time to value.

Organizations around the globe have been drawn to cloud computing for its ability to speed service delivery and to increase service and infrastructure

availability while creating elasticity that allows services to be expanded—or contracted—as demand changes.

Leverage

Because of this, organizations can leverage economies of scale through a cloud environment; they can also reap a higher ROI via greater staff

efficiency and optimization of IT resources.

With all these benefits in place, cloud computing can help IT become much more flexible and responsive to business needs.

However, cloud computing is still in its infancy in Kenya despite the inherent benefits.

　

　

It is with this in mind that organizations are addressing the transformation from a notion to reality of cloud computing as an ideological shift into a strategic and reliable option to lower their costs and maximize on virtual space.

According to IBM experts, cloud computing offers unlimited virtual opportunities for businesses to engage internally and externally whilst driving more agility within their expertise.

IBM East Africa Country General Manager Tony Mwai said the cloud – specifically the desktop cloud – business model is increasingly being embraced by a new class of smarter banks who are cutting costs and complexity from their organizations".

He added: "Clients are using desktop

clouds to safeguard data and applications and increase business flexibility and IBM has seen that helping client’s virtual desktop environments can

slash end user support costs by 15-40 percent."

　

IBM has further developed an application for mission critical operations, called "operational work flow".

The application integrates operations from

new contract creation and maintenance to payment.