Future Infrastructure to Embrace Cloud and Security

"We will begin to see increased outsourcing of commodity capability into the cloud," said Thalles Spellacy, chief architect, business alignment and strategic planning at TD Bank Group. "Whether that's as simple as email or whether it's exotic like risk modeling, it's inevitably going to go into the cloud, depending on its competitive differentiation. What does that infrastructure look like? Well, you start to divest a lot of what you historically had to maintain, but you still need to maintain that control. So you need security, you need performance characteristics. You need to be able to have some kind of brokerage model internally so you're really managing your interaction with your external parties in a controlled fashion. I don't think we're there yet."

While cloud has come a long way quickly, there is plenty of room for improvement. Tara Castleberry, head of architecture for Americas IT at AIG, said she is amazed by the ease with which she can spin up additional capacity. Equinix senior business development manager Henrique Hablitschek said he appreciates its ability to shrink a firm's IT stack. Yet he said cloud development is "still in the beginning of the second inning." (For our readers outside the US: There are nine innings in a baseball game.)

He said he also sees security coming to the fore as cyber attacks increase. Castleberry said security will move to the forefront of design plans when applications are being created.