Financial services firms are spending over £300 million each year on maintaining cloud services and funding “hidden costs” associated with cloud computing projects, a new report has claimed.

The study by Sungard questioned senior IT decision makers in the UK, Ireland, France and Sweden in a variety of organisations with more than 500 employees, with an average cloud spend of £700,000 in the last year.

The research revealed that the vast majority of the FS firms that were canvassed had encountered some form of unplanned cloud spend (89 per cent), with this sector reporting a higher figure than manufacturing (74 per cent) and the public sector (75 per cent).

Unforeseen costs included systems integration (54 per cent), people to manage the deployment (34 per cent), and the integration costs between different clouds (39 per cent). Each financial services business was also paying an average of £277,000 per year on maintaining cloud services, compared to an overall average of £200,000.

The research claimed that 56 per cent of FS firms cited reduced IT costs as an expected ROI in adopting cloud services, but only 33 per cent believed this has not been achieved. A third of respondents said that cloud had increased the complexity of their IT infrastructure, while interoperability with the existing IT estate was seen as a big issue by 44 per cent.

“By getting caught up in the hype, some financial services organisations were quick to adopt the cloud without linking it back to their wider business goals and failed to see the additional considerations such as interoperability, availability and the operational expenditure linked to cloud,” argued Keith Tilley, executive vice president, global sales and customer services management at Sungard Availability Services.

“Whilst they can indeed see incredible benefits from cloud computing including agility, flexibility and cost savings, the cloud needs to be deployed on a case-by-case basis in line with business goals and the nature of the application or the workload.”

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