Towards a secure cloud usage for financial IT

Cloud Computing and Big Data are the current hot topics in research and industry. Based on the enormous amount of preliminary work, ranging from grid and distributed computing to data mining and clustering, to name only a few approaches, cloud computing has become a defacto standard for computing in general and data-intensive industry tasks in particular. Thus, a lot of questions about how to develop and implement such systems are already answered, but nonetheless, there is reservation to adopt such techniques in some business areas. Most of the reservations are due to security reasons, as in certain areas, like in the banking sector or in the health industry, high levels of security standards have been met for decades and those standards must not be weakened. This is the reason why we investigate—closely together with partners from the industry—how to overcome security concerns in the adoption of cloud computing in the financial industry. An introduction to our strategies is given with this paper.