Andy Brown, Group CTO, UBS, discussed storage, Big Data, software and application development from the perspective of banks and financial services companies with theCube host John Furrier, live at EMC World 2013.

Talking about cloud adoption for banks, Brown said that “we are just starting on private cloud.” Virtual private cloud is interesting to this industry segment — it would have to be single tenant for banks to be really interested in this storage option.

Internal private cloud and external private cloud when you are single tenant, mean that you own the data and have control over access to it. But when it comes to public cloud, “we are not big implementers.”

What banks need for cloud adoption

The industry’s IT requirements have significantly changed after the credit crisis, he explained. Since 2008 there has been a big change where regulatory pressure is concerned. The sets of requirements banks need to be compliant with – risk, security, data protection and encryption all affect application development. The challenge is to deliberately create a data protection strategy that is aligned to the needs and requirements of any jurisdiction UBS operates in and applications and software solutions need to be developed accordingly.

“The policy management around our apps is extremely important,” Brown stated, as well the interpretation of the regulations. you have to make sure that the platform you are deploying can comply with policies and be adaptable to varying requirements.

When it comes to automation, Brown said they were in the early stages of deployment. Banks need to deploy technology that provides a way to embed legal requirements into technology they are using.

Banks and flash storage – new horizons

When it comes to storage, UBS uses solutions from several vendors, but Brown explained this is not a new problem that has been caused by storage choices. “We have most vendors in our environment today,” he said, along with tracking about 20 startups in the flash storage space. Highlighting what providers should offer, he mentioned they need to have clear tiering.  Cost is an important metric, he said. Comparing amazon’s cloud or others such providers with in-house systems, one sees a big difference in cost.

“Virtualization almost made compute free,” Brown said. “What is happening with flash is memory [is] almost made free.” Storage becomes really cheap. The flash piece is there for performance reasons, but it also ensures that the data that’s read most frequently is on the hottest and fastest storage environments.

Exploring future developments and innovation, Brown said all of the interesting, truly disruptive, breakthrough cases will be about data. Vertical implementations from vendors who understand a particular type of data really well are much more likely to be successful than those providing data in general to the enterprise.