Running a Bank in the Cloud?

James Gardner, Head of Innovation and Research at a major UK bank, writes a great blog called BankerWatch. In one of his recent posts titled "A New Kind of Event Please," he laments the events that vendors try to stage to interest bankers in "hot issues" and, more likely, the vendors latest products.

Instead of those kinds of events, Gardner says he's looking for more interesting and thought provoking stuff such as: "I'd like an event that would tell me how to run a bank in the cloud."

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, spoke at Paul Graham's Startup School 2008 conference at Stanford over the weekend. Bezos spent his talk focused on "the cloud" - what Amazon's doing with web services (AWS). All you have to do is to look at the first slide in his talk to see how "the cloud" is becoming an important business.