"The appetite to deploy cloud is incredibly high on Wall Street, which is always on the leading edge in deployment of technology and has entered a new world centered around efficiency and cost reduction," said Thomas M. Kilroy, vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, in an interview this morning. "Wall Street firms are looking at Google's and Amazon's clouds and saying, how do I get to that?" IT organizations seek the flexibility, scalability and cost-efficiency promised by cloud computing concepts.

However, Wall Street executives are frustrated by the barriers to clouds, he says, which include security, compliance and latency.

For public clouds (such as Amazon's EC2), "Anything running outside the firewall is viewed as a security and compliance risk," he says. "For most large-cap firms this is not a feasible option." Smaller firms that regard IT only as a necessary evil will be the ones to adopt public clouds. "Even if large-company CIOs were to venture out to the public cloud, after security and compliance fears the next concern is compatibility between what they're doing inside and outside the firewall."

Private clouds — internal IT infrastructures that mock the features of public clouds — are a different story; Wall Street firms are highly motivated to build them, Kilroy says. But Wall Street IT executives' biggest objective with regard to private clouds is to create a reference platform for IT that allows disparate technology components to interoperate within a cloud, he says. "Firms are tired of the usual pitches on cloud," he says. "They buy into the economics and flexibility of cloud computing. They're asking us, how do we create an open environment and not get locked into a proprietary implementation," he says. "They're asking the technology industry for an open standard that will run across all hardware platforms."

Kilroy says Intel's clients are looking for a cloud building block prototype that does not exist today. "That's a bold objective that's not going to happen overnight." He expects Wall Street IT executives will coalesce into a working group for cloud-related standards. "Working groups will force the technology industry to figure it out; this is our problem." In the next year, Kilroy expects these new cloud standards and reference architectures to emerge.