A few things I wouldn’t do, and some things you won’t do in the Cloud the way you expect to do them if you are a financial firm. As a side note, at one meeting a guy from a large consulting firm stopped me in mid-sentence, and asked me what I had against Veritas Clusters as an HA strategy in AWS. “For one thing, they absolutely don’t work in AWS, and aren’t possible” I replied. I’m predisposed to that answer though because I’ve seen VCS cluster crash more applications than they’ve saved for me.

If you are building financial apps in the Cloud you should probably re-architect your apps for high availability, and you do need to figure out autoscaling. And getting your current support team to the point where it can support or even know if there’s an issue with your Cloud deployments is easier said than done. A really big obstacle is that large enterprise always feels obliged to build everything themselves rather than consume third party services, and boy it takes them a long time to build out those services even in the Cloud.

Other tips:
1. I would not try to run the most essential corporate financial services applications in the Cloud unless I had a compelling business case to make. Then I would do so without hesitation, however, I would look for a simpler, lower risk strategy first. Between VPC, Direct Connect, volume encryption (not from AWS per se), and RDS for Oracle, the AWS Cloud has gotten pretty corporate application friendly.
2. I would not hire a really big consulting firm to help me or do it for me. I would consider hiring one of their project managers to run the daily scrum or something like that, and to break down uncooperative groups, and light a fire under people dragging their feet. The gap between the number of cheap Cloud skilled people, and the ability for large consulting firms to hire and deliver those people to your project, and keep them from leaving after a few weeks is the part that’s hard for Enterprise. The big consulting firms do not have enough Cloud skilled consultants to go around. You know that big skills gap you keep hearing about from Gartner? Well that’s what the big consulting firms are experiencing and that’s why it’s on the radar of firms like Gartner, even when large enterprise isn’t trying all that hard to directly hire Cloud people.
3. I would not begin with a Cloud Migration tool, unless I had already migrated a bunch of apps the old fashioned way. And I still haven’t tried a Cloud Migration tool, and I doubt I would. Corporate applications get “refreshed” every few years, which means upgrading the hardware and software of an application. At the point of a refresh, you find a lot of problems and strange things that were done in the name of who knows what. I’m not sure what could be so urgent that it would create the need to “bulk” migrate applications to the Public Cloud. If you are really eager, try migrating them to a Private Cloud if you are feeling brave, and use that experience as a nursery for deciding which apps can thrive and which require the hothouse of the corporate data center.
4. You won’t be deploying Oracle RAC, and you likely won’t be using Active Directory, OAM, or TAM in the Cloud.
5. If you don’t already understand SOA, you will need to figure it out pretty soon in the Cloud. Most large financial firms have not gotten very far with SOA, and have few web facing applications running in the DMZ. The hardest part of moving applications to the Cloud is not the apps you do move, it’s all the data center services you don’t move. You have to either federate the existing infrastructure, or rebuild it in the Cloud. You have to start doing things like using database replication and helping your DBAs to overcome their completely irrational fear of asychronous transactions and their complete and utter mistrust of “eventual consistency.”
6. I wouldn’t hire a large consulting firm for a small Cloud project. The main thing is that for migrating small, or even fairly large applications you may not want to pay the $10M to $20M that makes it worthwhile for the enterprise consulting firms to park their cars in your lot and start tooling around with your enterprise applications. Even if you are a F500 firm, unless you have a really giant project, or just feel like really burning your money, you will get people who may not be as smart as the Cloud experts on twitter. And if you get elite Cloud people, recognize that elite Cloud people that really know enterprise technology are as rare as unicorns.

So ok, that’s all I really had to say. I’m not sure if finance is ready to run in the Cloud. I think they are already doing a lot of Hadoopy type stuff in the Cloud. Also, look at what firms like Xignite are doing in the Cloud. Financial information providers like Bloomberg will run applications in the Cloud, if not now, they will in 2013. Look at NASDAQ Data On Demand. And check out a firm like reval (http://www.reval.com/Pages/default.aspx), which runs a SaaS based derivatives application platform in the Cloud. Yes, there’s a lot of cool financial stuff moving or already running to the Cloud and the more data in the Cloud, the more apps will follow the data to the Cloud. So maybe the incumbents will be cautious and the innovators will be lucky?

Here’s something I wrote about Market Data in the Cloud, NASDAQ, Xignite, NYSE EuroNext
The Network Effect of Market Data in the Cloud
http://blog.bronzedrum.com/2011/07/nasdaq-and-nyse-tale-of-two-exchanges.html?spref=tw