Under incessant pressure to drive down costs, innovate and get products to market faster than ever, companies have a clear business case for moving their applications into the cloud. Of course, security has top priority, especially in finance and insurance. Applications in the cloud are an outstanding way to tighten productivity and efficiency. As well as off-the-shelf business applications such as Microsoft Office, clouds can also provide complex, customised software solutions such as SAP, as well as specialised banking applications including online banking.