Nigel Kneafsey writes at Wall Street & Technology:

Cloud computing is emerging as a dominant technology category in the financial services industry, and investment banks, brokers, market makers and asset managers all will look to push more sophisticated applications into the private cloud.

In the span of a few short years, cloud computing has gone from being an enigmatic and somewhat exotic technology management model to a dominant force that is changing how business heads relate to and value the underlying technology that supports business growth. In the financial markets in particular, the implications of cloud computing on the business, however, have been neither clearly defined by the service provider nor clearly understood by the average consumer.