Are Banks Ready to Put Alerts in the Cloud?

Brewer says mobile communications to customers and employees is affected by the trend toward "bring your own device" (BYOD). "This leads to concerns about security but also about device support, especially regarding mobile devices where there is still a fairly high rate of innovation and change. Banks are unlikely to see it as economically viable to support all mobile platforms, but yet they need to because the model only works if all appropriate customers and employees can be contacted…is it still economically viable to acquire and support the IT resources need for peak volume processing for yet another electronic channel?" Brewer says the issues of device support and the cost of processing infrastructure could both be solved by using a cloud-based service to manage the message production, storage and delivery.

"This leads to the main question: If mobile messaging is becoming core to banks, how likely are they to trust a highly strategic and sensitive piece of processing to a cloud-based service provider, even if this solves various technical support and cost issues? The main stumbling blocks for many banks are the security of access to their data and reliability of the service. 2013 seems set to be the year in which these questions start to be resolved in terms of what is both credible and acceptable to banks, with positive movement being expected as the year progresses," Brewer says.

Infinite Convergence says EMS complies with security standards such as ISO 27001 and PCI DSS. "We ensure the transportation layer for the message is secure," says Lal, adding the content is decrypted at the user's device level.