As the industry is debating on the apprehensions associated with the cloud security, many banks across the globe are tapping on the potential of this cutting edge technology to streamline their back office operations. A recent study conducted by the Skyhigh Networks revealed that on an average, a bank uses approximately 844 cloud computing services throughout its network.

Another report by Reuters suggested that nearly 2/3rd of the banks worldwide are planning to incur more expenditure on information technology. This clearly puts forward the fact that cloud hosting solutions have increased the consumer centric applications, which includes social media platforms and B2B services. In order to realize the complete potential of the cloud, banks are striving to connect their applications with multiple users and enable them perform complex transaction from any location.

In broader strokes, with the changing IT behavior private banks in Asia and European regions are more concerned about enhancing customer loyalty to retain their existing clients by turning to the latest technological innovations.  In this light, they are striving to leverage the cloud technology and provide mobile banking applications to their valued customers. By doing so, they can adequately address the changing consumer preferences while trimming down their escalating operating costs and incurring zero up-front capital expenditures.

A leading research house, Gartner, estimated that over 60% of the banks globally will process maximum of their backend transactions by leveraging the cloud by 2016. This suggests that currently most of the financial institutions have realized the importance of cloud computing to not only simplify their operational tasks but also store critical customer data in a secured cloud-enabled environment. These institutions are even leveraging the flexibility of clouds to custom-built their specific business requirements while integrating their existing IT infrastructure.

This means that an elastic cloud environment with robust servers, software, and storage services offers scalability, performance, and higher economies of scale to banks to support their future growth. The applications are further shortening the time-to-market while enabling the mobile users to stay connected through their devices in this digital era.

Hence, the emergence of cloud technology has played a pivotal role in the newly evolving banking industry by acting as a gateway to the digital world via cloud-based banking applications.