There’s all kinds of ways to view clouds ― public, private, hybrid and a wealth of acronyms ― PaaS, IaaS, SaaS to accompany them but when you get right down to it there’s only two that really matter: the technical benefits of cloud and the business benefits of cloud.

This post is grounded exclusively around the latter of these two concepts and based on a recent article appearing in Forbes.com by Mike Pearl, a U.S. Cloud Computing Leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Pearl sets the table for his essay, Looking at Cloud Strategy Through the Lens of Value, with his contention that for many organizations cloud computing is inevitable. It’s not the latest buzzword , fad, or technology du jour that time will simply pass by. Instead, Pearl contends that “the cloud is…fueling a cultural shift, as business leaders are no longer limited by the technology they own, but rather empowered by the capabilities they can access dynamically…and undermining its true potential to give them a competitive edge.”

Leveraging the cloud’s true potential, Pearl outlines four PWC “value lenses” that help organizations develop their cloud strategies. These “lenses” help organizations, writes Pearl, to shift their focus from the underlying cloud technologies to developing and implementing a holistic cloud strategy that can lead to significant business opportunities.

Briefly, these “lenses” include the following:

Cloud-enabled IT transformation. This effort leverages cloud technologies from infrastructure through software to change the role of IT from custodian of IT assets to orchestrator of business services. For example, instead of investing in their own large data centers, IT organizations within life sciences companies can now leverage elastic computing resources available through the cloud to analyze large data sets – generated by electronic health records (EHRs) for predictive modeling, statistical tools, and algorithms – to improve clinical trial design and provide better analysis of disease patterns.

Transforming internal business operations to increase operational performance. In other words leveraging the best of what cloud has to offer in order to increase agility across the enterprise. For example, many organizations adopt cloud-based applications to meet process capability needs that their current on-premise systems may not be able to address.

Innovate around new products and services to generate additional sources of revenue. Pearl uses the example of new online media broadcasting offerings which use innovative video interfaces over high-speed broadband developed within a cloud environment to create new business models, ala San Francisco’s 311 non-emergency reporting system which has increased citizen collaboration and engagement, as well as shortened the time to address service requests and implement updates even during peak times.

Energize broader and more diverse channels and communities to connect with an ever-expanding pool of internal and external stakeholders in entirely new ways.  These digital interactions rely on the cloud communications backbone ― on both the technical and social levels. Companies should orchestrate these multiple social and mobile interactions for a greater share of the market and consumer demand.  The ability to engage with audiences across this spectrum creates opportunities for enterprises.

Pearl suggests that for enterprise executives cloud can enhance the value that their businesses provide, from their IT organization to their go-to-market and customer-engagement models, in fact cloud can serve as a strategy (or strategic asset) for maturing to a new level of technology enablement with cloud computing as its foundation.

In other words it’s time for enterprises to see “the cloud” as half-full, helping them transform their business models by creating new products and services and new modes of engagement among employees and with customers.

As noted in the outset of this post every business is different and tolerance for downtime will vary among them. Although the bane of all IT professionals is unplanned downtime, if you prepare your requirements ahead of it, you will have the ability as well as the strategy to successfully restore the business and bring it back from the brink of disaster.

Not sure the news that follows mostly favors the insurance industry or the pro-cloud proletariat, but to paraphrase Fox News, I blog and you decide.

According to this feature article in Cloudline, Crew Systems, a Japanese telemetrics company (defined by whatis.com as a technology that involves the automatic measurement and transmission of data from remote sources), has developed the equivalent of a black box driving data recorder for cars and trucks. The writer is quick to point out that in Japan businesses with five or more vehicles are required to produce daily reports on the driving habits of their drivers, which enables Crew to take advantage of a ready-made market for their products.

These automotive black boxes include a video camera that can record data about driver behavior and GPS location that also captures video and audio of accidents in real time.

All of that data is then streamed to a server in the cloud where its processed, analyzed and stored, ultimately ranking safe drivers based on proprietary algorithms. Keenly, the system can also produce forensically-sound recorded video images capturing any traffic accidents that have occurred, or even recorded acts of unsafe driving.

There’s also a gimmee” for the legal community where the admissibility of video images capturing traffic accidents at intersections and used as evidence in legal cases and for insurance claims requires proof that the data is tamper-free.

Enter Crew Systems and its innovative cloud solution. To meet legal thresholds the plaintiff/company needed a way to guarantee that the data had not been compromised in any way), ideally a contextual methodology to trace and time-stamp the car’s black box as the data was transferred to the cloud.

To achieve the integrity of this chain of evidence Crew partnered with a company, GuardTime, which sells a mathematically based keyless signature solution.

As described in the article, GuardTime’s local client timestamps each file or document giving it a unique signature which can be verified against a publicly available string or code. There’s no need to trust a third-party service or ensure that secret keys are securely stored. It can also be used to verify the integrity of anything digital, whether e-mails, documents or a whole batch of files.

The result? By signing all of the digital data collected with keyless signatures, Crew can provide empirical proof that the data has not been tampered with in any way since it was signed, regardless of how it is transmitted and stored in the cloud.

The company projects sales of over 10,000 units over the next year to a variety of businesses, including industrial waste disposal operators, reconstruction companies and enterprises with large vehicle fleets.

Crew Systems Japan. More proof that innovation is no longer confined to earth-bound solutions, but increasingly found migrating, skyward, to the cloud.

This is where enterprises will start to see the real value of the cloud. Many of the mistakes and evolutionary artifacts that resulted in data silos and black boxes in the past can now be avoided and resolved through careful planning and cloud adoption. Today’s cloud architecture is smarter than that of its on-premise ancestors, and integration, virtualization of underlying technology, and the ability to maintain business logic abstractly will accelerate the adoption of cloud solutions.

The cloud helps CIOs deliver IT as a service and empower end users toward self-service, and this is a benefit business executives can appreciate, as well. That’s good news for CIOs who are seeing more and more of IT’s budgets managed by non-technical executives. If IT leaders are to remain relevant in their organizations, they must adapt to this service-driven model.

Key take-away:  Depending on your business model the Cloud really can be all things to all users, but at its highest altitude it helps CIOs, as Gartner suggests, spend  fewer resources on running status quo processes everyday, and more on innovating for better service.

Big idea #6: The drive of knowledge workers to be more social and collaborate more will increase reliance on cloud-based IT resources.

Collaboration is critical in the global business environment, and knowledge workers need to access information and share it with colleagues, partners and customers inside and outside the enterprise. IDG Research recently looked at this trend and surveyed hundreds of enterprise-level IT managers. The subsequent report stated that, “the vast majority of knowledge workers (86 percent) placed a very high level of importance on collaborating with internal coworkers and external stakeholders, and having access to the most up-to-date corporate information.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to any knowledge workers or the IT teams who facilitate their work. When content can be centrally stored and accessed, knowledge workers are more efficient and effective. The cloud delivers the easy access these workers require, enabling enterprises to support decision making and move their businesses forward.

Key take-away: Far from being cast aside as cliche, “The way people work” – requiring access to massive content storage, agile information sharing and up-to-date availability from any device, enables the forward march footsteps to robust and firm cloud adoption.

Big idea #7: Seamless integration between legacy applications and the cloud no longer require overwhelming personnel hours or risk.

Advances in legacy integration solve problems that once hindered enterprise plans for cloud adoption. These tools are capable of connecting to and from all legacy applications and instantly integrating them without the need for manual coding. Automated options enable  legacy systems to easily connect and consume newly created Web services through automated actions, and by keeping integration in-house, organizations not only reduce the influence of underlying technology on current business practices, they retain control of that technology and build a foundation for easier future integration as systems and cloud architecture evolve.

Key take-away: In a cloud-based environment your legacy systems and applications can peacefully co-exist while supplying the building blocks for future, non-hardware based virtual integration.

Big idea #8: As companies build out their service oriented architecture (SOA) strategies and capabilities, the transition to the cloud will continue.

Links between clouds and data centers will expand and become even more important as legacy applications are service enabled. While some in the market might argue whether the cloud will overtake these SOA efforts, the fact is that the two are complementary. In building SOA, enterprises learned that technology was not enough; the right people and the right processes were also essential. The same lesson can be applied to cloud deployments. Both architectures are designed to facilitate sharing, deliver services and increase agility.

Big idea #8: In many ways SOA and the cloud share a common heritage and a mutual future: sharing data and services among multiple users in locations both physical as well as virtual, enabling businesses to raze their silos in favor of increased flexibility in connectivity and optimal collaboration among users.

In summary Yativ suggests that for some time, CIOs had to cajole their business counterparts into discussions about the cloud that moved beyond future plans and into concrete deployment schedules. There are numerous factors influencing that shift, but one common outcome: the realization of cloud computing will have positive outcomes for IT and business, as well as for internal and external end users.

And as the late great Walter Cronkite always offered viewers during his sign-off, “And that’s the way it is.”

Big idea #1: The drive to the cloud is accelerated by the synergy between four key IT forces: cloud, mobile, social and information.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. The fact is that all of these forces – cloud, mobile, social and information – have come together under the right conditions to make the final push toward cloud computing a reality. For example, mobile use is booming among both consumer and business users. The latter, by nature, are remote users, and it’s in the enterprise’s best interest to meet their needs. The notion of modern knowledge workers huddled closely around centralized data processing equipment is anachronistic in part because of the highly dispersed and mobile nature of the workforce. The cloud enables enterprise mobility by securing the data that travels over the Internet and reducing barriers to full mobile access.

Key take-away: “The cloud” is rapidly becoming the rails on which innovation travels from  station to station and no matter how or where its passengers (e.g. users) travel, they always have the ability to easily access the data they need to do their jobs.

Big idea #2: Enterprises are eager for limitless storage capacity at predictable prices.

Analysts predict that the cost of data storage will rise in the first half of this year, due mainly to the effects of flooding in Thailand that reduced disk storage output around the world by 30 percent. In a press release detailing IT spending trends, Gartner Research Vice President Richard Gordon said, “Thailand has been a major hub for hard-drive manufacturing, both for finished goods and components.” While hard-disk drive (HDD) rates should fall back to normal by 2013, this blip in capacity and rise in cost may push many enterprises towards the cloud, where excess capacity is already in place and business models are based on long-term amortization of costs.

Key take-away: With the cloud there are no dependencies on the supply of or cost of hard disk drives or other media (most notably tape), and ample storage is always available on an as-needed basis mapped to the real-time needs of the business.

Big idea #3: Barriers to cloud adoption are giving way as newer mobile application platform technology becomes available for use in private and public clouds.

There are still some barriers to enterprise mobility that may continue to hinder cloud adoption early in the year. But the evolution in mobile application platform technology will bring these hurdles down fairly quickly. That’s a good thing, since development of new enterprise mobile apps is currently constrained by the fragmentation in operating systems and devices. Many enterprises pursue a parallel development strategy to ensure that all smartphones can use applications. By the end of the year, this barrier should be reduced as more enterprises adopt mobile enterprise application platforms (MEAPs). By 2013, many of these MEAPs may even be hosted in the cloud.

Key take-away: As the cloud persists as an outcome to foster the transition of the mobile (e.g. virtual) workforce, the transition to the applications that support it will become ubiquitous and increasingly robust.

Big idea #4: MEAPs (Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms) answer questions about security that have dogged the enterprise and delayed cloud adoption.

The enterprise has been somewhat reluctant to go mobile due to security concerns, cost and functionality. Many fear that transmitting sensitive data over mobile networks could expose them to malicious attacks. MEAPs can provide device-independent solutions for fast, simple and cost-effective mobile deployments that take advantage of the functionality of today’s devices and set the foundation for the next generation of tools likely to be used by mobile workers. This means that businesses can seamlessly mobilize their core activities, blurring or even erasing any differences between back-office and front-end user experiences to provide mobile users with the ability to perform any business task from any location at any time.

Key take-away: In the cloud the accepted “lines” between physical machines and virtual endpoints continue to disappear, enabling both greater IT flexibility and fostering a more holistic and uniform user experience.

Not that data is any more or less valuable to an SMB as it is to a mid-size or enterprise customer, but given how quickly an SMB’s day-to-day operations could change if its data was suddenly lost, any quick lists like this 10-step checklist on ten useful steps to backing up SMB data recently published in IT Business Edge, I thought it was worth passing on.

And so, without further ado, courtesy of CRN and blogger Paul Mah:

1. Make sure your data is recoverable.  Making backups of existing data has long been determined as a crucial task for any business. However, not many businesses take the extra step of performing regular checks to ensure that backed-up data is indeed recoverable – a task that is equally, if not more, important.
2. Disaster-proof your data — SMBs tend to make the mistake of not looking far enough in terms of the worst-case scenario. As such, they may not prepare adequate measures against disasters such as fire or flooding. It is important to disaster-proof backed-up data by storing them at a separate location, preferably one that is not in the immediate vicinity of the data source.
3. Determine your data loss tolerance level — While the temptation is to back up every scrap of data, this is often not necessary and makes the entire endeavor an exorbitant one. Businesses should first determine the amount and type of data loss that their business can realistically tolerate. Next, put together your backup regime, starting with the data that the business could most ill-afford to lose.
4. Determine how long is too long without your data — How long can your business do without access to certain categories of data? Identifying this goes a long way towards helping a business to determine their recovery time objective (RTO). This in turn makes it easy to establish the kind of hardware and architecture that will be required to safeguard the data.
5. Find a backup solution that matches resources — Like building your own desktop computer, it is often tempting to throw in the fastest and most expensive components when assembling a backup infrastructure. The hard reality though, is that no SMB has unlimited resources at their disposal. As such, ensure that the backup solution being built matches up with available resources.
6. Ensure your backups are secure and compliant — Backup copies should be properly secured and kept at locations that are in accordance with pertinent regulations. Where possible, use of data encryption should be used to protect the data.
7. Make sure your applications can be backed up in real-time — This is a frequently overlooked point: Many server applications keep certain system or database files in a persistently open state. This may necessitate the use of special tools in order to perform a backup without first having to shut them down.
8. Protect mobile devices — Not typically considered as part of the backup regime, the BYOD phenomenon and the increasing access and storage of important business data on smartphones and tablets may soon force the hand of IT departments around the world. For now, it probably makes sense to start by protecting basic components such as contact data and documents on mobile devices.
9. Identify and discuss which backup technology is best — Not every backup technology is created equal; whether tape, online storage or network attached storage devices, each has their unique strengths and weaknesses. It is therefore important to properly identify the appropriate mix of backup appliances that will work for your SMB in the planning phrase.
10. Pick a good vendor — Finally, pick a good backup and recovery vendor to help you along. While this may appear as self-serving advice, I think SMBs need to be open about acknowledging the possibility that specialists in this area may perform better than their own IT staffers.

As a writer the turn of a single phrase is something to be appreciated and, in my case, shared for the benefit of our readers.

As quoted in Computerworld on the subject of disaster recovery and its relationship to business continuity, Carl Pritchard, senior risk management consultant at advisory firm Cutter Consortium says this:

“While business continuity is about being able to keep functions going, disaster recovery means being able to get everything back to whole again. The difference is business continuity is keeping the patient alive. Disaster recovery is getting them back to being healed and walking again.”

Pritchard explains that to get ahead, to keep the walls from crashing down around you, people with a business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan have the ability to return to a semblance of normalcy in a much shorter span of time than those without.

Survey Says

As outlined by writer Esther Shein, many small and midsize businesses are just not prepared for a disaster. Results of industry-sponsored surveys include the following findings:

57% of respondents in small businesses do not have a plan in place to deal with an outage or disruption to their computer or technology resources, compared with 47% of midsize businesses.

79% of those companies with disaster recovery plans in place stayed flat between 2007 and 2010 and reported updating their plans less frequently. Testing has also declined. Almost a quarter of companies reported testing their plans twice a year, and around half test once a year, while Forrester recommends companies conduct at least two full tests a year followed by several component tests throughout the year. For example, in 2007, 30% fully recover with zero downtime and, in 2010, that number dropped to just 13%.

What the experts interviewed for this article suggest and I think it’s an idea that has merit, is instead of focusing exclusively on technology, put a solid framework of disaster recovery processes in place and then prepare for the most likely causes of downtime. In other words, build out the hospital and get ready for your patients BEFORE you populate it with the latest technology.

This includes active discussion around the following elements:

Conduct a drill. Once you have a plan that says, “Here is where my data is going to be kept, here’s how my processes will be implemented and here’s what we’ll do the day of a disaster,” then conduct a dry run. Do a drill at least once a year.

Don’t wait until after the fact. Waiting until after a disaster strikes is costly and, for SMBs in particular, could mean the end of the business. Identify key systems and data that are essential to running the business.

Ensure information is completely protected. Be sure to implement appropriate security and backup systems for all important files, such as customer records, employee files and financial information. Make sure they are saved to both an external hard drive and an off-site location.

Test frequently. Plan to do disaster recovery testing regularly, as well as anytime there are changes in the work environment.

Review the plan. Make sure to review the disaster preparedness plan at least once a year, if not more frequently.

Questions you should ask in preparing your DR plan:

What is the company’s acceptable level of tolerance for outages? For companies such as financial institutions, the acceptable downtime is obviously zero, while others may have different tolerances.

How frequently do you back up your data (daily, weekly, monthly; and, in the latter case if you’re using digital tape, is it moved offsite)?

How do (and will you) structure where the data will be stored and how it will be accessed? (based on how you answer that question will calibrate and determine things like cost, capacity and, of course, tolerance for downtime).

What can’t you live without? What are the most important aspects of your infrastructure and your data? Not everything is mission-critical. As another expert cited in the article, Geoff Woollacott, suggests, rule number one is to determine where to store your data away from your physical business site in the event of a natural disaster and what to use. Will it be a bunch of tapes stored in a vault? Or will it be a data center that’s running at 60% of what you do now?

Remote Data Storage Key to Patient Prognosis

As Robert Amatruda, research director for data protection and recovery at IDC states in this article, “more and more companies and officers are demanding their data is moved off-site over the wire through replication technology or mirroring, depending on what vendors you’re using.”

Besides replication technologies (and this, of course, is music to my ears),companies need to have products that can perform continuous data protection, which moves the data or backs up that data in very short periods of time, so if there’s an outage the customer is able to resurrect the data from any point in time, enabling data to be close to current whenever it is restored.

Another option includes cloud back-up services, which are off-site scalable servers used to store and retrieve data so in the case of your primary site being down, you can have continuous, uninterrupted operations and to do this, of course, is to use a datacenter collocation vendor.

Finally, Amatruda recommends that for purposes of security any vendor you use applies antivirus and authentication software as well as encryption of data both at rest and in flight.

Get Your Patient Up and Walking

As Pritchard describes in the final analysis the downfall of a lot of organizations is they have “one thin veneer of disaster recovery” because they’ve only looked at one aspect of their operations, perhaps their computers, their data or their physical facility. “The problem is very few organizations look at … the communications, the networks, the personnel, the processes. Without looking at that whole big-picture view, they will lose something when disaster befalls them.”

In other words, once the patient is up and ambulatory, remember that a regular “diet” of holistic and occupational therapies (e.g. regular check-ups and testing) coupled with oversight by your friendly neighborhood Venyu representative, data lost due to disaster recovery can be significantly, if not dramatically reduced.

As a novice IT networking solutions professional I learned there are physical components to a network (modems, hubs, routers, servers and switches) and also logical ones (for example, the internetworking connections between links and nodes).

So too it is with the cloud.

There are physical dimensions to physical backup and recovery, such as backup tape and disk storage. There are also logical implications, including data mirroring and data restore.

My point is the fewer physical points your backup has to pass through the more secure it is.

Case in point:

According to an article in Information Age dated March 30 four storage disks containing personal information from approximately 800,000 individuals included in California’s Department of Child Support Services went missing as they were being transported from an IBM continuity facility in Boulder, Colorado to a storage unit operated by Iron Mountain in California.

The disks were being reportedly transported by a third-party shipping company, identified by the Boston Globe as FedEx.

In a statement dated March 12, 2012, “the Department of Child Support Services (DCSS) was notified by California’s Office of Technology Services) that contracted service providers, International Business Machines (IBM) and Iron Mountain, Inc. could not locate several specialized storage devices. It was confirmed on March 20 that the devices contained personal information. Since then we have been working to identify the individuals who are possibly affected by this incident.  Our primary goal has been to notify everyone as quickly as possible. Letters were mailed to all impacted parties on March 29, 2012.”

According to the article documents stored on the disks included names, addresses, social security numbers, drivers’ license numbers and health insurance plan ID numbers. A spokesperson for the department told the Associated Press that the devices cannot be read with conventional computing equipment.

Also included in the public disclosure was that last March, IBM informed insurer Health Net that the company could not find drives containing information for 1.9 million enrollees. The lost information included financial information, Social Security numbers, and health histories.

Sometimes, and especially in the unfortunate circumstances that Big Blue and Iron Mountain now find themselves, (never mind individuals in California’s DCSS services), logical connections often trump physical transport, and that’s true whether you’re talking nodes on a network or online storage in the cloud.

As for those three words you’ll never heard used when talking about backup and recovery in the cloud?

Those, of course, would be Lost in Transit.

Although the late Jim Henson’s iconic creature creation Kermit the Frog might disagree, it really is easy being green. And a new study proves that organizations that embrace green practices can not only cut costs but also realize greater returns on their IT investments by reinvesting savings into additional green-tech implementations.

The study and the resulting report, conducted by O’Keefe and Company and sponsored by CDW-G found, found that, according to this InfoWorld article, local and state government agencies throughout the United States realized returns from 134 percent to 269 percent on investments in server virtualization, document management, storage virtualization, and cloud computing. What’s more, the survey found that by implementing the technologies in that order, organizations could use the savings generated by server virtualization to fund almost all of the remaining three technologies.

As documented in the report (and the cascading logic appears sound, although I freely admit I’ve never really been a dyed-in-the-wool numbers guy), 93 percent of the 303 respondents said their agencies have invested in server virtualization, with the average investment being $289,512, which in turn would reap savings of $406,386, a 140 percent return. Those savings could be invested in document management solutions — embraced by 82 percent of organizations — at an average costs of $495,926; the savings averaged to $688,493, a 139 percent return. Eighty percent of the surveyed agencies have implemented storage virtualization at an average upfront cost of $213,336. Expected lifetime savings here total $285,122, for a return of 134 percent. Finally, 51 percent of the respondents have turned to cloud computing, spending an average of $110,022 with average savings of around $296,427, for a return of around 269 percent.

While the report doesn’t explicitly call out where the savings come from, but the usual suspects readily come to mind: reduced investments in storage and server equipment; lower energy bills thanks to decreased demand for electricity and cooling for the server room; less spending on paper, ink, postage, transport and file storage; and the coup de grace more efficient use of labor and outright man-hours, owing in part to having fewer machines to administer, fewer physical documents to handle and, in the case of cloud computing, fewer applications and services to manage.

Interestingly the respondents to the survey conceded that among the greatest sources of inefficiency in their IT departments (which green or virtualized tools address), are outdated  processes (36 percent) and outdated technology (35 percent). A bit more in the ether but still coming in at third and fourth place respectively are “lack of budget” and “lack of staff knowledge.”

Despite the optimum return to management in “going green” the report also reflects respondents’ comments that in order to maximize efficiencies they’ve spent time having to educate upper management about IT, lay out long-term plans for updating technology; change organizational culture to encourage and support efficiency; and develop and update processes and procedures accordingly.

Most significantly the report found that updating hardware alone did not provide the same savings in efficiency and income, demonstrating that moving to virtual options is the best way to produce substantial savings.

In sum, while it’s not easy to go green, once you do it quickly becomes your favorite color.

They grow up so fast.

Following its decisive victory over two “Jeopardy!” game show champions and an on-going pilot program with health insurer WellPoint, IBM’s Watson is coming to Wall Street.

The exploratory agreement between Big Blue and financial services giant Citigroup covers everything from Watson helping to streamline the banking experience for customers through to empowering financial professionals to make better business decisions. According to this article in itnewspost Watson will help the bank by “deploying its “deep content analysis and evidence based learning capabilities” to help “analyze customer needs and process vast amounts of up-to-the-minute financial, economic, product and client data.”

As Bloomberg reported, It will help analyze customer needs and process financial, economic and client data to advance and personalize digital banking. . .IBM is confident that with a little training, the quiz-show star that can read and understand 200 million pages in three seconds can make money for IBM by helping financial firms identify risks, rewards and customer wants mere human experts may overlook. . .

As reported in Network World in a blog post discussing the Citigroup agreement, Manoj Saxena, general manager of Watson Solutions for IBM, said Watson computers have the ability to engage in a written dialogue, ask users for additional information and display the logic and evidence the computer uses to create its recommendation.

For example, Saxena explained that in financial settings, Watson could use news reports, blogs, Twitter feeds, and transcripts of earnings calls with analysts, to “provide a 360-degree view of a customer and a complete contextual view of many decisions that a bank has to make.” For example, Watson can comb 10-Ks, prospectuses, loan performances and earnings quality while also uncovering sentiment and news not in the usual metrics before offering securities portfolio recommendations. It can also monitor trading, news sources and Facebook to help a treasurer manage foreign exchange risk,” said Saxena.

In another instance, Watson could assist loan officers in researching if an applicant is legitimate, or recognize people who have a high likelihood of fraud, he wrote. It could help sales representatives assist in financial planning for clients based on the customer’s finances, their past banking activity and what people of similar demographics have done.

Additionally, Citigroup hopes that Watson’s ability to understand natural language (as demonstrated in Jeopardy) will be able to provide “a first-of-a-kind customer interaction solution.” This will probably take the form of telephone and online banking where Watson helps customers complete a typed or spoken request.

And, according to IBM, there’s even more opportunity for Watson waiting in the wings, eh, that is cloud.

As part of a Twitter chat about the Citigroup agreement, (the account is managed by a pair of IBM workers), the company revealed that Watson is intended to be deployed on both private as well as hybrid (e.g. private-public clouds).

According to details included in the Network World article, Citigroup may look at using cloud to handle data ingestion which process and analyze data for a particular use case, which takes advantage of the Watson framework which requires users to input data into the computer that can be analyzed, which could also be done through the cloud.

An alternative pattern is hosting Watson’s QA engine in the cloud and keeping proprietary data on premises. In fact, to put a fine point on it Watson will only be available “as a service” and the company has even cleverly coined the term WaaS, or (and yes, you guessed it), Watson as a Service.

While I can’t see the future or even try and project how effective a day trader Watson will turn out to be, the one thing I can be sure of this isn’t the last time we’re going to being hear from Big Blue’s most innovative data compiler and dare we even think it, future CFP (Certified Financial Planner)?

As I said at the outset of this post, they grow up so fast don’t they?