CBA's executive general manager of enterprise services Tim Whiteley said vendor lock-in was a concern - especially since cloud computing was marketed as being more flexible than traditional IT. 'How do we not buy the old model under a new name?' he said.
In one sense, the concerns expressed by Whitely and his colleagues at ANZ and Westpac are accurate. As Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman has been pointing out for some time, the onset of cloud computing gives vendors the chance to lock customers in to their infrastructure, using proprietary protocols to ensure they're on the monthly billing cycle as long as possible.
However, on the other side of the coin, there's also a lack of granularity around the banks' public statements in the area.
Also this week, Commonwealth Bank chief information officer Michael Harte made it clear the bank was engaged in a variety of different areas when it came to cloud computing. At a briefing in Sydney he mentioned the fact that the bank carried out testing and development work on both internal private cloud and external public cloud infrastructure, as well as using standardised virtualisation environments running on Linux on top of x86 server hardware. The bank is also engaged with storage as a service and database as a service options.
Harte noted that the bank was able to port some of its non-mission services to third-parties. Extrapolating, it's not hard to see that if the CBA was running a stack of VMware virtualised environments on its own infrastructure, it wouldn't be too big a stretch to shift some of those virtual machines of lesser importance off the grid and into the datacentres of external providers.
