The cloud. It’s the buzzword that keeps on buzzing. Years after the concept became a hot topic in mainstream circles among all, it is still the subject of many debates within the financial services industry, and everyone, from the vendors hawking transformative solutions to the leeriest buy-side firms, seems to have an opinion.

That’s not to say that nothing has changed, however. A Refinitiv report last fall predicted that the financial services industry will spend 48% of its collective IT budget on cloud services in 2020, up from 41% in 2019. Around the same time, a survey by IHS Markit and WBR revealed that 80% of buy-side respondents will use the cloud for data management by the end of 2020. Those figures are a far cry from the early days of the cloud, in which tepid adoption rates and cautious technologists dominated the conversation.

“Historically, one of the common misconceptions from the buy side with respect to technology strategy is that the perceived risks of the cloud can outweigh the benefits,” said Hoony Youn, CTO at MackeyRMS, a provider of SaaS-delivered research management software for investment managers. “I think that has changed dramatically over the past few years. As the buy side has embraced the cloud, many of the older perceptions, that the cloud is less reliable and less secure, have proven to be quite the opposite.”

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