Security and Operational Controls for a Public Cloud Service in a Financial Institution

Abstract

Today, cloud computing services are growing very fast. One of the main reasons for this is the increasing competition and innovation in the market, the increased demand for resources in IT systems and the demand for more complex knowledge-based solutions. Deploying a server and performing the associated tasks on your own infrastructure can often take weeks or months, while the same process takes only a few minutes with a cloud service provider. The use of cloud services has become commonplace for anyone using mobile devices, and for financial institutions, this technology is becoming inevitable in the short term. If an organisation carefully selects a service provider on the basis of legal, technical and information security criteria, and then monitors its operations on an ongoing basis, there is no reason why a financial institution should not use public cloud services, according to the criteria examined. It is important to stress, however, that our analysis did not cover all possible risk factors.