But be warned, it may not work out cheaper than running your own infrastructure.

Cloud computing is one of the hot topics in financial services and is often sold as a way of more cheaply running software and services across large organisations. However, Joe Weinman, strategic and business development vice-president, AT&T, told delegates that this may not be the case and that anyone considering the economics of cloud computing should be very careful.

"Cloud computing makes sense for individual users and small businesses: you are not going to ask your mum to lend you $40 million to build a data centre so you can run your own private email, you'll use hotmail in the cloud," he said. "But if you are a huge multinational bank, it may actually cost out cheaper to build the infrastructure, buy the software licences and manage the system yourself rather than go to the cloud." Where cloud computing does come into its own is where it is used as a utility, he said. "It may cost more in terms of per use [than building it yourself], but when you are not using it, you get a 100 per cent cost reduction - it costs nothing," he explained. "This is the real economics of the cloud."

Russell Daniels, vice-president and chief technology officer, EDS, Hewlett Packard, agreed, but stressed that the cloud is also platform agnostic, so can make for a much more cost-effective way of rolling out new services and technologies across multiple sites and geographies. "It is utility computing and it is very important, especially to the financial services industry as it allows it to expand what it does while servicing its legacy systems."

Roland Slee, vice-president banking and capital markets, Oracle Asia Pacific added: "Banks have large sets of complex apps and the propensity to change them is low because of regulation, cost issues and general legacy complexity. There is no drive for optimisation. What cloud computing allows is for banks to look at optimisation of data and technology because it offers low cost of infrastructure change and low cost of access to new services."